INDOEUROPEAN VIDEO TRANSCRIPTION:

Radio Sunrise serves west London community of mixed races – Punjabi speakers in the midst of 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 Gujarati are related – something discovered by chance 200 years ago by a multilingual English lawyer Sir William Jones. Ha was judge who went 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 Sanskrit, which is the language of ancient India, which was first written about 500 A.D., and then he realized and 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 these were sprung sprung from some common source. It is surprising that no one spotted the resemblance earlier. Take the numbers again for example. The Sanskrit, on the right, bears strong resemblance 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 in different languages are related. Look at the words for four. This is one of many examples, where word beginning with “q” in Latin say, is similar to Greek beginning with “t” and the Sanskrit word beginning with “k”. This sound correspondence 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 the 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 the grammar similarities on those sounds, similarities in their inflections, similarities in the syntax of the language and so for, the similarities have to be very precise and they have to be interlocking for the assertion that these languages form a family or to be believable. If you take a look at English word like tooth and see that in Hindi it’s dant and that it doesn’t mean that much, but if you take a look at English tan which _________ in Hindi is das and you see 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, the new word, in English shows up in Hindi_______ and you have 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 Iceland to India form one family called Indo-European. They can ever reconstruct the earlier ancestor of these languages-Proto-Indoeuropean.