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.