Indo-european excerpt from before
babel Transcription
Radio
It’s surprising that no one spotted the resemblances
earlier. Take the numbers again, for example, the Sanscrit,
on the right, bares a strong resemblance to 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 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”, or a Sanscrit 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 that you’re looking at
reflect a single original language and therefore form a family. The only way
you can do that is by finding sistematic similarities
between these languages in every area of their grammar, similarities in sounds,
similartities in their inflexions, 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. If we 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 up in Hindi as“das”, and the same pattern
emerges- you have got an initial “t” in English and and
initial “d” in Hindi. When you find that the word “two” though, the new word,
in English, shows up in Hindo as “do”, once agin an initial“t” in English and
an initial “d” in Hindi. You begin to think that this is not an accident.
Linguists have now established that a whole range of
languages, stretching from