TRANSCRIPTION:
‘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 Greek and 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 lock 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”, 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.’