Radio Sunrise serves the West London Community of mixed treasures Punjabi speakers in the midst of an English suburb.

[Chinese speaker]

What could be these two languages: Punjabi and English have in common? In fact, English and Punjabi, as well as other languages of northen India, like Kindi and Gujarati 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 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 five hundred a.d and then he realised he made this great discovery, that Sanskrits 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 has strong resemblance to Latin and Greek on the left. The right one, two and three out this, four and five in the closed a lot to spot the connection. English to discover rules that haven’t got sounds in different languages are related. Look at the words for four, this is one of many examples where the word beginning with"q" in Latin say is similar to a Greek word beginning with "t" and the Sanskrit word beginning with "k". These sound correspondences cannot be how apparently unrelated languages and members of the same family. 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 their inflections, similarities in 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 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 "doe", 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.

Linguistics has now established by the original languages stretched from Iceland to India form one family called Indo-European. They can even reconstruct an earlier ancestor of these languages, Proto-Indo-European.