Transcription

Radio Sunrise shows the west London community of mix raises: Punjabi speakers in the mixed of the English suburb.

What could these two languages Punjabi and English have in common?

And guess what? A daughter has fallen in love with who……yes……

In fact, English and Punjabi as well as other languages of the north of India like Hindi or Gujarati are related. Something discovered by chance, two hundred years ago by a multilingual English layer Sir William Jones.

He was a judge who went out to India in 1783 and he studied languages, oriental languages, before he went. And when he got to India, he became very interested and learned Sanskrit, which is the language of ancient India, which was first written about 500a.d. and then he realised he made this great discovery, that Sanskrit resembles in some way its relationship with Greek and Latin and other languages and he gave a very famous discourse in which he said that these was sprung from some common source.

It’s surprising that no one spotted the resemblances earlier. Take the numbers again, for example, the Sanskrit on the right has strong resemblance to Latin and Greek on the left. The while one two and three are obvious, four and five need a closer look to spot the connection. English have discovered rules that govern has 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/. These sound correspondences can review how apparently unrelated languages are members of the same family.

The question is how can you tell, that the languages 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 and their sound similarities and other inflections similarities on 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 are to be believable.

You take a look at an English word like ´´tooth´´ and see that in Hindi is ´´dant´´ and the bites of that doesn’t mean very much. But you take a look at an English ´´ten´´ and it shows up in Hindi as ´´das´´ and you see the same pattering emerging. You’ve got an initial /t/ in English and an initial /d/ in Hindi.

When you find that the word ´´two´´, the numeral, in English shows up in Hindi as ´´do´´ and you’ve 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 Island to India form one family called Indo-European. They can even reconstruct an earlier ancestor of these languages: Proto Indo- European.

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