Father Tongue, Motherland Quotes

“At the heart of my approach to finding the skeletal structure of the Indus Valley languages is my belief that the features of the modern Extended Indus Valley Periphery languages that do not come from Sanskrit and the prakrits are likely to be calques, literal translations of structures that existed in languages that lived in the region before Sanskrit and the prakrits appeared.”
― Peggy Mohan, Father Tongue, Motherland: The Birth of Languages in South Asia

“An area as large as the IVC would not have had a single language, but at least as much variety as the region has today. There would have been standard urban varieties, and a large number of little dialects spoken in the hinterland, differing in their proximity to the standard urban varieties. The most urban people would probably have been the first to adapt to unstoppable change, while the poor, looking away from evidence of decline, would have lingered in their old worlds, preserving the old languages and culture.”
― Peggy Mohan, Father Tongue, Motherland: The Birth of Languages in South Asia

“Sanskrit was oral: for centuries it had no writing system, and when it did get one, it was not much used, as there were elaborate procedures in place for memorizing texts. Maybe it was a good decision to keep it oral, as this restricted access to all but a small and inbred group of Vedic men who had full control of the valuable srauta rituals. As a result, the sound of the language was the first thing anyone would notice, and this made it clear who was 'us' and who was not.”
― Peggy Mohan, Father Tongue, Motherland: The Birth of Languages in South Asia

“At the beginning of this book, I spoke of a song, a requiem for someone who had died, where the message was hidden in the chord structure, the substratum layer, while the tune, the first thing most people go to, to find meaning, floated in the air above it, ephemeral, forgettable, almost an afterthought. Flesh does not last, it seemed to say. But bones might. And so could the wonderful things we built when we were alive. You can still see us, if you know how to look, and imagine how we lived. But you will have to make do with an X-ray image.”
― Peggy Mohan, Father Tongue, Motherland: The Birth of Languages in South Asia

“It is only when they see how complex and arbitrary grammatical gender is in the north, where even nouns that do not yet exist are pre-assigned a gender (a hadron collider would have a gender, for example), that they sit back in wonder. Weapons we don't yet have. Scientific processes that are only now being developed. Made-up words. All of these have a gender in the Extended Indus Valley Periphery, and what is more, no one has any doubt about what it is going to be.”
― Peggy Mohan, Father Tongue, Motherland: The Birth of Languages in South Asia

“If we ever needed any evidence that Sanskrit was slipping away as a first language, this is it. Brahman men were not learning Sanskrit as a first language, or they would have had no problem with the most complex Sanskrit verb morphology. But by this time Sanskrit was something they slipped into briefly, before going back to their 'real' lives.”
― Peggy Mohan , Father Tongue, Motherland: The Birth of Languages in South Asia