Transcription of the indoeuropean video

Radio sunrise serves a 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 two hundred years ago by a multilingual English lawyer, sir William Jones.

He was a judge who went up to India in 1783 but he had studied languages, oriental languages, before he went and he got to India, he became very interested in learning sankrist, 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 sankrist resembles in some ways- has relationships with Greek and Latin and other languages and he gave a very famous discourse in which he said that these were brought from one common source. It's surprising that no-one spotted the resembles earlier. Take the numbers again for example. The sankrist on the right has a strong resemble to Latin and Greek on the left. But while one, two and three are obvious, four and five need a closer look to spot a connection. Linguistics have discovered rules that govern how sounds in different languagesare 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" and the Sankrit word beginning with "k". This sound corresponces can reveal how apparently unrelated languages are members of the same family. The question is how can you tell that 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 similarities between these languages in every area of their grammar, similarities in their sounds, similarities in all their inflections, in the syntax of the language and so forth, the similarities have to be precise and they have to be interlocking for the assertion that these languages form a family to be believable. If we took an English word like "tooth" and see that in Hindi it's "dant" and that by itself doesn't mean that much but you take a look at English "ten", which shows up in Hindi as "das" and the same pattern emerges, you have got an initial "t" in English and an initial "d" in Hindi. When you find that the word two though, the new word, in English, shows up in Hindi as do, 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 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.