TRANSCRIPTION OF THE INDO-EUROPEAN VIDEO

NARRATOR: Radio Sunrise serves the West London community of mixed races. Punjabi speakers in the midst of an English suburb.

(Man reading text in Punjabi)

NARRATOR: What could these two languages, Punjavi and English, have in common?

(Man reading text): And guess what? Her daughter has fallen in love with who...?

NARRATOR: In fact, English and Punjabi, as well as other languages of Northern India like Indy and Gujurati are related, something discovered by chance two hundred years ago by a multilingual English lawyer: Sir William Jones.

PROF. COLIN RENFREW: 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 Sanscript, which is the language of ancient India which was first written about 500 A.D and then he realized he made this great discovery that sanscript resembles in some way, has relationship with Greek and Latin and other languages and he gave a very famous discourse in which he said this was sprung from some common source

NARRATOR: It’s surprising that no one’s spotted the resemblences earlier. Take the numbers again, for example. The sanscrit, on the right, bears strong resemblence to latin and greek, on the left. But 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 on different sounds 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”, and a sanscript word beginning with “K”. This sound correspondences can reveal how apparently unrelated languages are members of the same family.

DON RINGE JR: The question is how can you tell that the languages you’re 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, similiarities in other inflections, similarities in syntax of the language and so forth. And similirities have to be very precise and they have to be interlocking for the asserstion that these languages form a family or to be believable.

We take a look at an English word like tooth and see that in indy is dant and by itself that doesn’t mean very much. But you take a look at english Ten and it shows up in indi as Das and you see the same pattern emerging: you’ve got an initial “T” in english and an initial “D” in indi. When you find that the word two, another numeral, in English shows up in indy as do and you’ve got once again an initial “T” in English and an initial “D” in indie, you begin to think that perhaps this is not an accident.

NARRATOR: Linguists have now established that a whole range of languages, stretching from Iceland to India, form one family called Indo-european. They can even reconstruct an earlier ancestor of these languages: proto Indo-european.