- "Radio Sunrise" serves the West-London community of mixed races, Punjabi speakers in the midst of the Englis suburb.
What could these two languages, Punjabi and English have in common?
- "And guess what? Her daughter has fallen in love with who? yes..."
- In fact, English and Punjabi as well as other languages of Northern India like Hindi or Gujarati are related, something discovered by chance 200 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 580 AD and then he realised 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 that 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 bears a strong resemblance to Latin and Greek on the left. But while 1, 2 and 3 are obvious, 4 and 5 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 before. 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".
- 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 you can do that is by finding systematic simmilarities between these languages in every area of their grammar simmilarities, and their sound simmilarities, and other inflection similarities, ans the syntax of the language, and so forth. These simmilarities 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 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 the 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", 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 the whole range of languages stretching from one family called Indo-European. They can even reconstruct an earlier ancestor of these languages Proto-Indo-European.