Transcription

Radio Sunrise serves the a West London community of mixed races -Punjabi speakers in the midst of an English suburb. What can 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 two hundred years ago by a multilingual English lawyer Sir William Jones.

He was a judge who went out to India in 1783, but he’d studied languages, oriental languages, before he went, and when he got to India, he became very interested and learnt Sanskrit, which is the language of ancient India, which was first written about 500 AD, and then he realised, and he made this great discovery, that Sanskrit resembles in some way, has relationships with Greek and Latin and other languages, and he gave a very famous discourse, in which he said these were sprung from some common source.

It’s surprising that no one spotted the resemblances earlier. Take the numbers again, for example. The Sanskrit, on the right, bears a strong resemblance to Latin and Greek, on the left. But 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 before for four. This is one of many examples where a word belonging with q in Latin say is similar to a Greek word beginning with t, and the 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 you are looking at reflect the a single original language and they then form a family? The only way you can do that is by finding systematic similarities between these languages in every area of their grammar: simmilarities in their sounds, similarities in their inflections, similarities in the syntax of the language, and so forth, and 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 you take a 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 shows up in Hindi as “das”, and the same pattern emerges emerging – you’ve got an initial “t” in English and an initial “d” in Hindi. When you find that the word “two”, the numeral, 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 perhaps 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 an earlier ancestor of these languages – Proto Indoeuropean.

Ana Albalat Mascarell

March 2009