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Peggy Mohan’s Followers (26)
Peggy Mohan
* Note: these are all the books on Goodreads for this author. To add more, click here.
“for a language to acquire retroflexion is for it to become South Asian.”
― Wanderers, Kings, Merchants: The Story of India through Its Languages
― Wanderers, Kings, Merchants: The Story of India through Its Languages
“The Vedic people stopped interbreeding with the earlier local population and began to talk of purity only when they no longer needed women from outside their community as wives, because they now had enough girl-children whose early mixed roots, they decided, did not matter. And the British came up with their racist notions of not mixing with Indians only after the Suez Canal opened and there were fast steamships bringing white British women to India in search of British husbands. Purity is a convenient political myth floated by the powerful to justify brutal apartheid.”
― Wanderers, Kings, Merchants: The Story of India through Its Languages
― Wanderers, Kings, Merchants: The Story of India through Its Languages
“Bilingualism and diglossia are different. Bilingualism is about two languages you know having essentially the same functions, such that it is easy to translate from one to the other. Simultaneous translators are bilingual, or even trilingual as the United Nations requires, because they need to be able to say exactly the same things in their different languages.
With diglossia, however, what you find is a child first learning one language and speaking it at home, and then later on, maybe at school, transiting to another language which is used for less basic things. The end result is not two separate languages that exist in parallel, but a single competence, where ground-level things are done in the first language and things to do with school, or the modern sector, in another. And since each of these languages is bound to its context, translation is not easy.”
― Wanderers, Kings, Merchants: The Story of India through Its Languages
With diglossia, however, what you find is a child first learning one language and speaking it at home, and then later on, maybe at school, transiting to another language which is used for less basic things. The end result is not two separate languages that exist in parallel, but a single competence, where ground-level things are done in the first language and things to do with school, or the modern sector, in another. And since each of these languages is bound to its context, translation is not easy.”
― Wanderers, Kings, Merchants: The Story of India through Its Languages
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