INDO-EUROPEAN SOUNDTRACK

Radio Sunrise serves the West London community of mixed races- Punjabi speakers in the midst of an English suburb. What could these two languages, Punjabi and English, have in common? In fact, English and Punjabi, as well as other languages of Northern India like Hindi and Gujurati are related-something discovered by chance 200 years ago by an English lawyer, Sir William Jones. He was a judge who went out to India in 1783, but he had studied languages, oriental languages, before he went, and when he got to India, he became very interested and learnt Sanscrit, which is the language of ancient India, which was first written about 500 A.D., and then he realised, he made this great discovery, that Sanscit resembles in some way, has relationships with Latin and other languages, and he gave a very famous discourse in which he said that these were sprung from some common source.

It’s surprising that no one spotted the resemblances earlier. Take the numbers again, for example, the Sanscrit, 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 Sanscrit 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 sistematic 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 Iceland to India form one family called Indoeuropean. We can even reconstruct the earlier ancestor of these languages- Proto Indoeuropean.