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
It’s surprising that no one spotted the resemblances
earlier. Take the numbers again, for example, the Sanscrit, on the right, bares
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 with “q” in Latin say, is similar to a Greek word beginning with
“t”, or 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 you can 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 sistematic similarities between these languages in every
area of their grammar, similarities in sounds, similartities in their
inflexions, 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 we look at an English
word like“tooth”, and see that in Hindi it’s“dant”, and that by itself that
doesn’t mean that much, but you take a look at English “ten”, which ends
up in Hindi as“das”, and the same pattern emerges- you have got an initial “t”
in English and and initial “d” in Hindi. When you find that the word “two”
though, the new word, in English, shows up in Hindo as “do”, once agin an
initial“t” in English and an initial “d” in Hindi. You begin to think that this
is not an accident.
Linguists have now established that a whole range of
languages, stretching from