Video: Indo- european excerpt from before Babel

Radios sunrise serves a west London community of mixed races, Punjabi speakers in a mist of English speakers.

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

In fact English and Punjabi as well as other languages of northern India such as Hindi and Pujariti are related, something discovered by chance two hundred years ago by a multilingual English lawyer S William Jones 

Its surprising that no one spotted the resemblances earlier, take the numbers again for example, the sand script on the right bares a strong resemblance to Latin and Greek on the left. But 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 and a sand script word beginning with K. These sound correspondences can reveal how apparently unrelated languages are members of the same family.

Linguists have now established that a whole range of languages stretching from Iceland to India form one family called Indo-European. They can even reconstruct an earlier ancestor of these languages, Proto-Indo-European.