Radio “Sunrise” serves the vest London community of mixed races, Punjabi speakers in the midst of the 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 Guajarati are related, something discovered by chance   two hundred years ago by a multilingual English lawyer, Sir William Jones.

Prof. Colin Renfrew(Universidad de Cambridge)

“He was a judge who went up to India in 1783 but he studied languages, oriental languages, before he went and when he got to India he became very interested and learned Sanskrit which is the language of the ancient India which was first written about 500 A.D.  and then he realized he made this great discovery that Sanskrit resembles in some way has relationships to Greek and Latin and other languages and he gave a very famous discourse in which he said that this was  sprung from some common source .”

It is surprising that no one spotted the resemblances earlier. Take the numbers again for example. The Sanskrit on the right bares a strong resemblance to the 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 has 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” and a Sanskrit word beginning with “k”. These sound correspondences can reveal how apparently unrelated languages are members of the same family.

Don Ringe. Jr. (Universidad de Pennsylvania)

“The question is how can you tell that the languages you   are looking at reflect a single original language and therefore form a family? The only way to do that is by finding systematic similarities between these languages in every area of their grammar: similarities in their sounds, similarities in their inflexions, similarities 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. You take a look at an English word like “tooth” and see that in Hindi is “dant” and by itself that doesn’t mean very much but you take a look at the English “ten” and it shows up in Hindi as “das” and you see the same pattern emerging. You’ve got an initial “t” in English and in initial “d” in Hindi when you find that the word” two”, the numeral, in English shows up in Hindi as “do” and you’ve got once again an initial “t” in English and an initial “d” in Hindi and you begin to think that this is perhaps not an accident .”

Linguists have now established that a whole range of languages stretching from Iceland to India form one family called Indo-European. They can even reconstruct an earlier ancestor of these languages, Proto-European.