FAULT LINES

The pre-Sanskritic roots of Indian languages

- PEGGY MOHAN

In Father Tongue, Motherland, published by Penguin Random House India, Peggy Mohan reflects on the development of modern languages in the subcontinent, asking questions about when they might have arrived, whether writing was what stabilised them, and what made people shift to them. In the following excerpt from the book, she writes: “Our most important takeaway from this story is that just as we have, in archaeological terms, an Indus Valley Periphery region, we also have, in linguistic terms, something I like to think of as an Extended Indus Valley Periphery region. This is a linguistic terrain where the languages fall into one megafamily connected by their common features that do not link back to Sanskrit and the prakrits.”

LET US NOW RECAP AN OLD STORY, but this time with a slightly different spin.

Once upon a time there was a language, early Sanskrit, with a structure that looked a lot like Avestan, Greek and Latin. In its earliest days it did not yet have the almost ubiquitous South Asian retroflex sounds—t, d, n, l and ş. It was a language where nouns took eight different case endings, depending on which class they belonged to, and could be singular, dual or plural. Verbs too had different conjugations, or paradigms, the same tenses as verbs in Avestan, Greek and Latin, and the subject was the same in all tenses. I eat, I will eat, I ate. Verbs agreed with their subjects using person markers, not gender markers, even though Sanskrit had three genders, masculine, feminine and neuter: khādati meant “he/she/it eats.”

As the Vedic migrant men took local wives and had children, spoken Sanskrit would have taken on a few local features, mainly in its accent. The children would have brought in a local pronunciation, adding t d n, ş and maybe