From Cavafy's Ithaka :
Keep Ithaka always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you are destined for.
But do not hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years,
so you are old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy with all you have gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.
Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey.
Without her you would not have set out.
She has nothing left to give you now.
And if you find her poor, Ithaka won't have fooled you.
Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,
you will have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.
Will Stutely writes in.
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Michael Witzel on David Frawley :
For, the past is an alien land. Rigvedic culture is not the same as that of modern Indians, just as little as modern Taiwan Chinese have the culture of Confucius or of the Shang realm. In India, the undeciphered Indus script has disappeared early in the second millennium BCE and many of the ancient subcontinental languages have disappeared, just as Sumerian, etc., from Mesopotamia. However, those of the ancient Panjab are still visible in the c. 4 per cent of non-Sanskritic loan words in the Rigveda (F.B.J. Kuiper, Aryans in the Rigveda, 1991). Largely, they represent a prefixing language ("Para-Munda", Witzel 1999), like the Austro-Asiatic Munda (Jharkhand, etc.) and Khasi (Meghalaya). This means, incidentally, that R. Nagaswamy's assertion (Open Page, July 2) that I support Parpola's claim for a Dravidian speaking Indus civilisation is wrong (EJVS 5-1, Witzel 1999). A Dravidian language substrate appears only in the later parts of the Rigveda. Contrary to Frawley's claim, the direct link to the Indus civilisation has thus been lost both in script and in language.
However, the archaic language of the Rigveda has been preserved by Vaidik Brahmins. But the Vedic language, like all others, did change, from the Rigveda to the Upanishads. Compare modern English with that of Old English of some 1000 years ago (fader ure, du bist in heofnum... "Our father, you are in heaven"). The Rigveda has many grammatical forms that had simply disappeared by the time of Panini. He and Sayana do not know, e.g., of the injunctive (e.g. han: Indro 'him han). The same kind of changes is found in the meaning of Vedic words (pace Frawley): brihat does not mean `big' but `high', pur not `city' but `small fort', graama not `village' but `wagon train, circled when resting', raajan not `king' but `chieftain', paapa not `sin' but `evil'. The same can apply to samudra: etymologically, it means nothing but a collection (sam) of water (udr-). This could be a pond, a lake, a confluence, and (later on) "the big pond' (as we call the Atlantic), the "ocean." Close study is required of the whole range of meanings in the Rigveda and of their context. We cannot simply plug in the desired result into the very formulation of the question, and then force each passage accordingly, as Frawley does consistently, without any countercheck. He simply feels that the `logical meaning' of a word suffices. To translate graama by `village' may seem `logical', but it will not fit the Rigveda, nor even the much later Brahmana texts! (W. Rau, Zur vedischen Altertumskunde 1983; Rau, in: M. Witzel, Inside the Texts, Beyond the Texts. 1997).
I was reading a Tamil grammar book the other day, and it looks like Tamil has all the cases that Sanskrit has, and in the same order. Out of trivia such as this, a theory may be formed. Not a good theory, not a correct theory, but a theory. Most likely a terribly misinformed theory. One can't be too careful with the past, that "alien land."