Leti's Castle

Nombre: Leticia Badía Torrente

Edad: 21 años

Carrera: Filología Inglesa, 4º año

E-mail: lele@alumni.uv.es

Exercise 4

INDOEUROPEAN VIDEO TRANSCRIPTION

Radio Sunrise serves a West London community of mixed races. Panjabi speakers in the midst of an English suburb. What could these two languages, Panjabi and English, have in common? In fact, English and Panjabi, as well as other languages of Northern India like Hindi and Gujarati, are related. Something discovered by chance, two hundred 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 - 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 AD, and then he realised he 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 that this was sprung from some common source.

It's surprising that no one spotted the resemblances earlier. Take the numbers again, for example. The Sanskrit, on the right, bears a 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 and 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' and 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 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 the sounds, similarities in other inflections, similarities 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 or to be believable. You take a look at an English word like 'tooth' and see that in Hindi it's 'dant' and that by itself it doesn't mean very much. But you take a look at English 'ten' and it shows up in Hindi as 'das' and you see the same pattern emerging: you've got an initial 'T' in English and an initial 'D' in Hindi. When you find that the word 'two', the numeral, in English shows up in Hindi as 'do' and you've 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 a whole range of languages, stretching form Iceland to India, form one family, called Indo-European. They can even reconstruct an earlier ancestor of these languages: Proto-Indo-European.