INDOEUROPEAN SOUNDTRACK
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 Gujarati are related; something
discovered by chance 200 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 A.D., and then he realized, he made
this great discovery, that Sanskrit 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 Sanskrit, on
the right, bares 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 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 the 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 that 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 their inflexions, 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 to be believable. If you take a look an English word
like “tooth”, and see that in Hindi it’s “dant”, and that by itself that
doesn’t mean very much, but you take a look at English “ten”, which ends
up in Hindi as “das”, and you see the same pattern emerging, you’ve got an
initial “t” in English and initial “d” in Hindi. When you find that the word
“two”, the new word, in English, shows up in Hindo 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 Indo- European. They can even reconstruct the earlier ancestor of these
languages: Proto Indo-European.
Academic year 2008/2009
© Lorena Levy Ballester
lolevyba@alumni.uv.es
Universitat de València Press