Peggy Mohan

Amazing read. Highly recommended if you are interested in Indian languages and/or sociolinguistics. The author uses analogies and parallel examples to paint a picture of how series of migrations to the Indian subcontinent shaped its languages. She provokes the reader to think about things before continuing to answer them. Some parts of the book read almost as if she's taking you along her train of thought in trying to decipher the origin of a language as we know it today. The number of references from Wikipedia and other not-strictly-academic sources are a bit unsettling given the seriousness of the topic, but I would like to believe that they don't impact the main story all that much. I read Tony Joseph's book "Early Indians" just before this one and it unexpectedly set a great context for this book.… (lisätietoja)

While the writing is easy, there is an uneasy feeling that the author is approaching this subject from a position of a forced innocence, and is discovering fairly common factoids as though they were nuggets of pure wisdom. Everybody knows, for instance, that Malayalam has a considerable mixture of Sanskrit words and constructs (as do, obviously, also Kannada and Telugu, but Tamilians have found original Dravidian terms to replace much of this). Similarly, why is the author so thrilled at meeting familiar Persian- or Arabic-origin words in Turkish that sound familiar? So it's not clear what exactly the author hopes to convey, or who is her intended audience (perhaps NRIs who are hopelessly cut off from their sources?).
Another problem I have is that a substantial part of the text is occupied by suggestions from other regions (creoles/pidgins from South American Suriname, Guiana, the Caribbean, for example), or by metaphors (marble chips to make a mosaic, DNA transfers, tirimasu bear cookies, pickle-making, etc.), whose relevance is not clear, but which are really distracting.
However there is some useful information on the difference between old Malayalam and the later Sanskritised manipravalam. Overall, the impression is of ideas picked up on a skimming of the languages and the very margins of the body of existing knowledge, and the text reads more like a blog than a piece of scholarship. Since the author seems to have some good insights into how the languages in India evolved, one wishes she had approached the subject in a more organised and systematic way, and without harping so frequently on the situation in the Caribbean.… (lisätietoja)