TRANSCRIPTION OF THE INDO-EUROPEAN
VIDEO
- "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.