TRANSCRIPTION: “INDOEUROPEAN EXCERPT FROM BEFORE BABEL”

Radio sunrise serves a West London community of mixed races- Punjabi speakers and 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 Indi 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 out to India in 1783, but he’d studied languages, oriental languages, before he went, and when he got to India, he became very interested and learnt Sanscrit, 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 Sanscrit 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 “these were sprung from some common source”.

It’s surprising that no one spotted the resemblances earlier. Take the numbers again, for example: the Sanscrit, on the right, bears a strong resemblance to Latin and Greek, on the left. 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 whit “q” in Latin say, is similar to a Greek word beginning with “t” and a Sanscrit 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’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 sounds, similarities in their 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 to be believable. You take a look at an English word like “tooth” and see that in Indi is “dant” and that by itself that doesn’t mean that much; but you take a look at English “ten” which shows up in Indi as “das” and you see the same pattern emerging- you have got an initial “t” in English and an initial “d” in Hindi. When you find that the word “two” though, the numeral, in English, shows up in Hindi as “do”, 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 a whole range of languages, stretching from Iceland to India, form one family called Indoeuropean. We can even reconstruct an earlier ancestor of these languages- Proto-Indoeuropean.

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