INDO-EUROPEAN
Comparing what these languages, Punjabi and
Indi have in common.
In fact, English and Punjabi as well as other
languages are related. Something discovered by chance 200 years ago by
multilingual English linguist Jones. He was a judge who ended up in
When he daunted to India, he learned Sanskrit
(language of ancient India first written 500 a.D) and he realised that Sanskrit
resembled in some way, had relationships with Greek and Latin and other
languages and he made a very famous discourse saying that some languages spread
from some common source.
Take the numbers again:
The Sanskrit on the right bears a great
resemblance to the Latin and Greek on the left.
But while one, two or three are obvious, four
and five need a closer look to spot the connection.
The English scholar discovered a rule that
governed 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” and a Sanskrit word beginning with “k”.
Q=T =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 you are looking at reflect a single original language and therefore,
form a family.
The only way we can do that is by finding
systematic similarities between these languages in every area of their grammar
similarities and their sounds. Similarities in other inflections, similarities
in syntax and so forth similarities have to be very precise and they have to be
interlocked for the assumption that they form a family and to be believable.
Take a word like the English word tooth in Indi
is dant.
Ten “
“ “ das.
Two “ “
“ do.
The initial t in English coincides
with initial d in Indi.
We begin to think that perhaps this
is not an accident.
Linguists have now established that
the whole languages stretching from