Indian Languages #1: The Linguistic DNA Tag

In her book on Indian languages, Wanderers, Kings and Merchants, Peggy Mohan writes:

“(Languages) did not sprout in continuity like new branches from the same tree from where they started, but were like different trees that happened to be neighbours stretching their branches, touching each other and sharing structure.”

 

Take Sanskrit. It seems to have taken an entire sound system from other languages, feels Madhav Deshpande from Michigan University. (Note the difference – he isn’t talking of individual words; he is referring to sounds). How did he come to that conclusion? To understand that, we first need to understand “dental” sounds and “retroflexion” sounds. If you’re like me, you probably have no idea what that meant! But worry not.

 

Dental sounds are made by the tongue touching the upper teeth (that means त, थ, द, ध, न, and श). Whereas retroflexion sounds are made by the tongue curled upwards (ट, ठ, ड, ढ, ण, ष).

 

Sanskrit started off similar to other Indo-European languages (Greek, Latin and Persian), all of which have the dental sounds but not retroflexion sounds. Whereas the Dravidian languages (Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada and Telegu) have retroflexion sounds. Therefore, Deshpande believes that Sanskrit must have gotten the retroflex sounds via “contact” with the Dravidian languages.

 

But it’s more than just 6 new sounds that Sanskrit gained, says Deshpande. It gained a more general contrast – dental v retroflex. To understand that point, look at these words Mohan cites - दाँत (tooth) and डांट (scold). Try spelling them in English the way they are supposed to be pronounced - it’s painfully hard. Why? Because one word has all the dental sounds, the other has all the retroflexion sounds – something European languages don’t support (and therefore don’t have letters for). Whereas it is effortless to differentiate them in Sanskrit/Hindi because they have letters for those sounds. And they have letters for those sounds because, as Deshpande said, it is a general contrast that became an integral part of the language and therefore, were assigned dedicated letters.

 

In fact, says Mohan, the dual dental and retroflex sounds is a feature of almost all languages of the Indian subcontinent. And thus:

“Retroflexion is like a linguistic DNA tag that marks a language as either belonging to the subcontinent or not.”

Conversely, she says:

“For a language to gain retroflexion meant it had set down roots in South Asian soil.”