TRANSCRIPTION OF THE VIDEO

Radio Sunrise serves a west- London community of mixed races. Punjabi speakers and the mixed English suburbs. What could these two languages Punjabi and English, have in common?

(“…and guess what? Her daughter had fallen in love with who?...”)

In fact, English and Kytabee, as well as other languages of north-India like Indi and _______  are related. Something discovered by chance 200 years ago, by a multi-lingual English noyel, Sibling Johnnes.

“He was a judge who went up to India in 1783, but he studied languages, orient languages before he went. And when he’d gone to India he became very interested and learnt Sanskrit, which is the language of ancient India which was first written about 500 a. D. And then he’d realized, he made this great discover here that Sanskrit resembles in some ways has relationships with 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’s surprising that no one has spotted the resemblances earlier. Take the numbers again, for example.

The Sanskrit on the right, there’s a strong resemblance to Latin and Greek, on the left. The ____ 1, 2 and 3 obvious, 4 and 5 need a closer look to spot the connection. Linguists have discovered rules that go around sounds in different languages are related. Look at the words for “4”, this is one of many examples where a word beginning with “Q” in Latin say, it’s 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 here is, how can you tell that the languages you’re looking at reflect a single and original language and they are fore form a family? The only way you can do that is by finding systematic similarities between these languages and every area of their grammar similarities and, their sound similarities and their inflexions similarities _______ 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 that in English word like our “tooth” and see that in Indi it’s “Dant” and that by this it doesn’t mean much. But you take a look at our English “10”and it shows up in Indi as “Das” and you see the same pattern working . You’ve got in the initial “T” in English and an initial “D” in Indi. When you find that the word “Two” of the New World in English, in Indi shows up as “Do” and you’ve got once again an initial “T” in English and an initial “D” in Indi you begin to think that perhaps this is not an accident.”

Linguists have now established that the 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.”