Title: Father tongue, motherland
Author: Peggy Mohan
Publisher: Penguin
Pages: 361
Price: ₹999
As the son of a journalist and a lover of books, I have always been fascinated by languages and words. A question that profoundly intrigues me is the origin of words and their evolution: where do words really come from?
In search of answers, I came across linguistics, a field that I had never heard anyone discuss, which is a tragedy. Having acquainted myself with the subject a bit, I now feel that linguistics-based careers, such as computational linguistics (which has found its niche in the emergent field of AI), have enough scope to outlast more traditional occupations that are currently considered "endangered."
Linguistics introduced me to the concept of etymology, a branch of linguistics that deals with the overall development and origins of words present in our lexicon. After further research, I was introduced to the larger field of historical linguistics, which deals with the broader implications of the discoveries made through tracing etymologies.
Using historical linguistics, we can effectively draw "family trees" of languages. While this may seem more or less insignificant to the layman, it is an important tool used by historians to create timelines of events such as large-scale migrations; historical linguistics helps us draw informed conclusions that go hand in hand with the discoveries already anticipated by archaeology.
Usually, this is where linguists stop.
However, in her trail-blazing new work ‘Father Tongue, Motherland’, linguist Peggy Mohan takes it a step further by analysing the origin of the languages spoken in the Indian subcontinent. Her book takes a look at the bare "bones" that make up the underlying structure of our languages in search of potential answers.
Migrations and Man’s Domain
Mohan begins her work by outlining her theory of language birth due to migration. She believes that the languages present in modern-day India are the result of an influx of male migrants that arrived in the subcontinent and incorporated people of the pre-existing civilization into their new society. Usually, this would take the form of the "father tongue" entering the "mother's land."
According to Mohan, this process would eventually lead to the creation of a regional variety of the father tongue spoken by the hybrid children of the natives and settlers, which Mohan labels the "Prakrit" variety.
The Prakrit would serve as an approximation of the original father tongue, with regional influence on aspects such as accent and pronunciation. The noted linguist believes that this run-off process would lead to Prakrit incorporating more regional features over time on top of the original vocabulary.
To some extent, the author's goal in this book is to reverse-engineer some aspects of these original languages which were indigenous to India prior to the migrations. Her main focus in this book is on certain features such as grammar and phonology, which she believes are highly conserved traits; that is, they are not subject to change in the same way that our vocabulary is.
In other words, Mohan looks at the "bones" of a language instead of its outer "flesh."
Linguistic Developments
Mohan begins her book with the example of Dakkhini, a language she believes emerges at the intersection of multiple tongues. Dakkhini emerged sometime after 1347, when the Sultanate forces arrived in the Deccan.
These Sultanate forces brought the vernacular form of Hindi, Dehlavi, along with them, and the features of the local Marathi, Kannada, and Telugu slowly made their way into the new tongue.
She also writes on how languages such as Hindi indicate divergence from the initial features and conjugation systems of their parental languages. An interesting example provided in the book is that of the verbal nouns of Sanskrit evolving into words used as tenses. For instance, the word "kartr" (doer) became "karta" (doing).
The linguist digs deeper than the surface-level Sanskrit in order to unearth the original "Language X" of the subcontinent, a language possibly spoken by the inhabitants of the Indus Valley civilisation. She retraces a multitude of grammatical features to this ancestral tongue in the process and concludes that Punjabi and Tamil both bear a striking resemblance to the proposed Language X.
Dravidian Migrations
Mohan returns to the mystery of the Dravidian languages and uses a combination of historical evidence and linguistic features to determine a rough timeline of when the migration to the South occurred.
She then turns our attention to the history of Nepali and how it developed through a process similar to the one she outlined, which she dubs the "Tiramisu Bear model," aptly named after the hybrid offspring of a male grizzly and female polar bear.
The author concludes by remarking that while certain "invasive languages," such as Sanskrit in the past and English in the present, are destined to bring irreversible change wherever they go, it is necessary for a living language to persevere.
While "Father Tongue, Motherland" is hard to navigate due to its highly technical approach and layered, complex narrative, it is worth reading for its valuable insights into South Asian linguistic diversity.
Muhammad Awan is a Class 10 student. He can be reached at: awanemails7@gmail.com YouTube: @muhammadawan7
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