Paraspar, an initiative of the Office of Communications (OoC) at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), is a platform for conversations about knowledge systems, particularly science.
PARASPAR
Invites you to a talk on
IN SEARCH OF ‘LANGUAGE X’
Reconstruction of an Indus Valley language
Abstract: Attempts to reconstruct a hypothetical Indus Valley language have, up to now, concentrated on trying to decipher the Indus Valley seals, or on tracking stray words in Rig Vedic Sanskrit that appear to have come from earlier local sources.
This approach, instead, focuses on the ‘ancient bones’ still visible in the sound systems and grammars of modern languages of the Indus Valley Periphery, features that do not come from Sanskrit or the prakrits. These languages share an operating system, or substratum, that seems to trace back to a language family that immediately preceded Sanskrit and the prakrits.
By comparing these features in many modern languages of the Indus Valley Periphery, and with a model that anticipates this sort of layered change, one can ‘triangulate’ backward to how they could have manifested in a hypothetical Indus Valley language: Language X. This gives us an ‘X-Ray’ image of its inner architecture, which is enough to give us a reasonable picture of who the Indus Valley people actually were.
Speaker: Peggy Mohan
Author
Visiting Professor
Ashoka University, Delhi
🏛Venue: Faculty Hall, Main Building, IISc
📅Date: 24 March 2025 (Monday)
⏲Time: 4 pm
Poster
All are welcome
For any queries, please contact Bitasta Das (bitasta@iisc.ac.in), Office of Communications, Indian Institute of Science.
