Indo-European
Excerpt From Before Babel
Media
Sunrise serves the West London Community of mixed races, Punjabi speakers in
the midst of an English suburb.
What
could these two languages, Punkabi and English, have in
common? In fact, English and Punjabi, as well as other languages of Northern
India like Hindi and Gujarati, are related. Something discovered by chance two
hundred years ago by a multilingual English lawyer, Sir William Jones.
Ø Professor
Colin Renfrew (Cambridge University)
‘He was a judge who went
out 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 ancient India, which was first written about 500 AD,
and then he realized 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 this was 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 has 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
had 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], and a Sanskrit word beginning with
[k]. These sound correspondences can reveal how apparently unrelated languages
are members of the same family.
Ø Don
Ringe Jr. (Pennsylvania University)
‘The question is “How can
you tell that the languages 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 their sounds, similarities in other inflections,
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 or to be believable. You take a look at an
English word like “tooth” and
see that in Hindi it’s “dant”,
and by itself that doesn’t mean very much. But you take a look at 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 an 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, 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 Indo-European; They can
even reconstruct an earlier ancestor of these languages: Proto Indo-European.