Indian Languages #2: Aspiration

In her book, Wanderers, Kings and Merchants, Peggy Mohan talks of another feature of Sanskrit that is absent from the Indo-European languages - aspiration. That refers to the sound of the following letters – ख, घ, छ, झ, ठ, ढ, थ, ध, फ and भ. As Peggy Mohan amusingly puts it, these are sounds that require the vocal cords from being close together to suddenly move away from each other, a feat “difficult for anyone not used to such acrobatics to manage”. Dravidian languages too lack these sounds.

 

Strangely, while Hindi has these aspirated sounds, other languages of the North West (like Punjabi, Sindhi, Balochi, and Pashto) don’t! This suggests, says Mohan, that even the North Western languages have a Dravidian substratum – and Sanskrit is the exception when it comes to the aspirated sounds.

 

Such sounds that are unique to a language, writes Mohan, can help track population movements. How? By seeing if they start to “absorb” new sounds, structure and grammar; or alternately how they “transmit” their sounds, structure and grammar to languages of other regions.

 

If those who move come as warriors and conquerors, they (obviously) don’t bring their women as part of the migration. But if they settle down in the conquered lands, then they marry the local women (This is particularly true for the Indian subcontinent where bringing in the conquerors’ women isn’t easy, due to the Hindu Kush). The language of power and the rulers is thus the language of the men; while the language at home for the kids becomes the mother’s language. Some exchange of words, grammar and sounds becomes inevitable at home, and both languages now have “genetic” markers of the exchange. Note this is totally different from a language like English, which despite centuries of colonialism, only exchanged words in isolation, but never changed the grammar, structure, or sounds of either side. For example, the British used the लाठी charge so often, and yet never learned to pronounce the word right because, hey, they didn’t have (and never absorbed) the aspirated ठ sound into their language.

 

Which brings us to the difference between bilingualism and diglossia. Bilingualism is when two (or more) languages exist side by side and serve pretty much the same purpose e.g. French and English in Quebec, Canada. In this setup, people can easily translate from one to the other. It is easy to translate because both languages serve the same purpose – governance, commerce, education, whatever – and thus have (different) words for the same thing.

 

Diglossia, on the other hand, refers to multiple languages co-existing, but for different purposes. This happens when conquerors came – the language of the courts, governance and power is their language. Whereas the language at home for most people and the language of daily life is another. Translation is very hard in such cases, since their context (and thus vocabulary) is totally different.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Student of the Year

Image
As a toddler, my daughter loved Alia Bhatt’s songs, esp. the ones from Student of the Year . (That movie did have many good songs and well-choreographed dances). Fast forward to present day, when she is 12 yo. She rarely watches Hindi movies now, but one of the few ones she likes of late, Raja aur Rani ki Prem Kahani has, yes, Alia Bhatt.   If I had any hopes that there was anything to be read in the name of her toddler-time favorite ( Student of the Year ), they have been dashed. Our conversations come exam time are perfectly captured by this photo and its caption: In fact, the pic below captures how she and I look at her answer sheets – me intently, she with an expression of “It’s over, so why are you even looking at it?”   Of late, we pull her leg and tell her that she isn’t showing any signs of academic prowess, she’d better find a rich guy to marry. Some time later, she showed us this meme on the Internet: “Me No Study, Me No Care Me Go Marry Millionaire If He Die
Read more

Animal Senses #7: Touch and Remote Touch

Instinctively, we think touch is based on contact. Not entirely true, explains Ed Yong in Immense World – there’s a more important aspect than contact: “These incredible feats are possible through movement. If you rest a fingertip upon a surface, you can get only a limited idea of its features. But as soon you’re allowed to move, everything changes. Hardness becomes apparent with a press. Textures resolve at a stroke.” As you run your fingers over a surface, they hit the tiny peaks and troughs and set off vibrations in the mechanoreceptors at their tips.   At the tip of its snout, the star-nosed mole has many pairs of hairless appendages. It uses them to touch things around itself. Alive or dead? Food or ignore? It does these movements at an insane speed. In the time it takes to blink our eyes, the star-nosed mole can probe, identify and swallow its food. “Light may be the fastest thing in the universe, but light sensors have their limits, and the star-nosed mole’s sense of
Read more

The Retort of the "Luxury Person"

Image
Coming up with biting and witty retorts. It’s something we dream of, but rarely manage to pull off. Worse, the more we stew over the offending remark, the more likely we are to come up with that dream retort, as Calvin ruefully points out: During our last holiday at the Taj Resort, seeing my wife carrying towels to our poolside chairs, one of the kids there mistook her for a member of the staff and asked for a towel. When my wife narrated this to us, I did not imagine that my 8 yo daughter would come up with her own retort. But a day later, my daughter recapped the incident, an incident that didn’t even involve her in the first place , and said, “You know what I’d have told that kid who asked for the towel?”. And without waiting for an answer, she told us anyway: “I don’t work here. I too am a luxury person who is living at this resort. Go get your own towel.” We were highly amused by the phrase she had coined: “luxury person”. It certainly captures the kind of holid
Read more