INDO-EUROPEAN TRANSCRIPTION
Radio
It’s surprising
that no one spotted the resemblances earlier. Take the numbers again, for
example, the Sanskrit, on the right, bares a strong resemblance to Latin and
Greek, on the left. While one, two and three are obvious, four and five need a
closer look to spot the connection. Linguists have discovered rules that govern
how sounds in different languages are related. Look at the words for “four”.
This is one of many examples where a word beginning with “q” in Latin say, is
similar to a Greek word beginning with “t”, or a Sanskrit word beginning with
“k”. These sound correspondences can reveal how apparently unrelated languages
are members of the same family. The question is how can you
tell that the languages that you’re looking at reflect a single original
language and therefore form a family.
The only way you can do that is by finding systematic
similarities between these languages in every area of their grammar,
similarities in sounds, similarities in their inflexions, in the syntax of the
language, and so forth, and the similarities have to be very precise, and they
have to be interlocking for the assertion that these languages form a family to
be believable. If we look at an English word like” tooth”, and see that in
Hindi it’s “dant”, and that by itself that doesn’t
mean that much, but you take a look at English “ten”, which ends up in
Hindi as “das”, and the same pattern emerges- you
have got an initial “t” in English and initial “d” in Hindi. When you find that
the word “two” though, the new word, in English, shows up in Hindo as “do”, once again an initial “t” in English and an
initial “d” in Hindi. You begin to think that this is not an accident.
Linguists have now
established that a whole range of languages, stretching from