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 Gujurati are related- something
discovered by chance 200 years ago by an English lawyer, Sir William Jones. He
was a judge who went out 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 Sanscrit, which is the language
of ancient India, which was first written about 500 A.D., and then he realised, he made this great discovery, that Sanscit 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 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 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 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 Iceland to India form one family called Indoeuropean. We can even reconstruct the earlier ancestor
of these languages- Proto Indoeuropean.
