Indian Languages #3: Assorted Features

English has prepositions, whereas most Indian languages have post-positions, writes Peggy Mohan in Wanderers, Kings and Merchants. In English we say “in Mumbai”, in Hindi it is “मुंबई में”, in Tamil it is “மும்பையில்”. Notice the contrast in the “position word” and the noun – in English it comes before (pre); in Indian languages it comes after (post).

 

Unlike English, in many north Indian languages, verbs have a gender. In English, “eats” tells nothing about the gender of the eater whereas “खाता” tells it is a male eater (the same goes for Marathi). When you dig deeper, you realize the structure of the languages are very different. In English, you “are ill” while in Hindi “तबियत ठीक नहीं”. Mohan says “तबियत” is a noun – state of health. Which leads Mohan to wonder – are languages of the north “noun-friendly”? And if so, why? Is it because, she wonders, for the same reason that Kerala absorbed nouns from Sanskrit, but not verbs:

“Do nouns travel better, or with less discomfort for the languages they travel to?”

 

Then there’s ergativity. This is a bit complicated, but bear with me. It involves the subject and object changing places when you switch to past tense. As always, an example is easier to understand. Present tense: मैं खाता हूं (I eat). Past: मैंने खाना खाया (I ate). Notice how the verb (eat) is associated with the subject (मैं) in present tense? Whereas in the past tense, the verb (ate) is associated with the object (खाना). That’s ergativity. This is true for some (Hindi, Balochi, Pashto) but not all Indian languages. Ergativity wasn’t there in Sanskrit at the time of the Rig Veda; and it came later. Probably an influence of local languages.

 

Then there are compound verbs. They’re not in Sanskrit, but present in the other Indo-Aryan languages. Again examples make it easy to understand. Take खा लिया, and हो जायेगा. Here खा (eat) and हो (be/become) convey the basic meaning. लिया and जायेगा are vectors, i.e. they serve as grammatical markers and convey whether the action of the word preceding them is completed or not. This is definitely not a simplification, it’s a complication. If Sanskrit didn’t have it, from where did it come? Probably from the Dravidian languages – Tamil has that syntax (உடைந்துவிட்டது), so too does Malayalam.

 

All of which is why Mohan says:

“Everytime we turn for answers about un-Sanskritic features in Indo-Aryan languages we find ourselves… (in) languages that were there before Sanskrit… old languages that refused to pack up and go away.”

 

Another interesting analogy Mohan draws is to horizontal gene transfer (HGT) amongst biological species. That is the phenomenon whereby entire fragments of DNA are shared and transferred across species (this is esp. common among bacterial species). In Indian languages, we see something similar to HGT:

“Fragments of other languages have been ‘captured’ not merely as new vocabulary, but are now used to express grammatical relationships, some of which did not even exist in the original languages.”

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