Transcription of the video about Indo-European
language.
Radio Sunrise serves the West London community
of mixed races- Punjabi speakers in the midst of an English suburb.
What could these two languages, Punjabi and
English, have in common? In fact, English and Punjabi, as well as other
languages of Northern India like Hindi and Gujurati
are related- something discovered by chance 200 years ago by an English
lawyer, Sir William Jones. He was a judge who went out to India in 1783, but he
had studied languages, oriental languages, before he went, and when he got to
India, he became very interested and learnt Sanscrit,
which is the language of ancient India, which was first written about 500 A.D.,
and then he realised, he made this great discovery,
that Sanscit 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 source.
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 Iceland to India form one family called Indoeuropean. We can even reconstruct the earlier ancestor
of these languages- Proto Indoeuropean.
Academic year
2008/2009
© Daniela Curadelli
dacu@alumni.uv.es
Universitat de Valčncia
Press