Radio Sunrise the West London Communitie of mixed races Punjaby

speakers in the middest of an English suburb.

(an Indapur language of

“modelating” with is “child” objecte.)

What could this two languages Punjaby and English have in common?

In fact. English and Punjaby as well as other languages of North of India like

Hindi and Gujurati are related, something discovered by Chance 2000 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 and

oriental languages” before he went. And when he got to India he became

very interested and learned Sanskrit, which is the language of the ancient India,

which was first writen by 500 A.D and then he realised that he made a great

discover; that Sanskit resembles in some way, has relationships with Latin and

other languages, and he gave a very famous discourse in which he said that these

were sprung from some common sources.

It’s surprising that no one spotted the resemblances earlier, take the numbers

again, for example, the Sanskrit, 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 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 said, is similar to a Greek word beginning with “t”, or 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 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 asertion 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 Iceland to India form one family called Indoeuropean. We can even

reconstruct the earlier ancestor of these languages,Proto- Indoeuropean.