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.