Radio Sunrise serves a West London community of mixed races, Punjabi speakers in amidst 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, are related. Something discovered by chance two hundred years ago by a multilingual English lawyer, Sir William Jones.

“He was a judge who went out to India in 1783, but he 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 Sanscrit resembles in some ways, 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 common source.”

It’s surprising that no one spotted the resemblances earlier. Take the numbers again, for example. The Sanscrit, on the right, bears 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 Sanscrit word beginning with -k-. These sound correspondencies can reveal 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 in their sounds, similarities in their inflections, similarities in the syntax of the language and so forth. And these similarities have to be very precise and they have to be interlocking for the assertion that these languages form a family to be believable. You take a look at an English word like ‘tooth’ and see that in Hindi it’s ‘dant’, and by itself that doesn’t mean very much, but you take a look at English ‘ten’ and it shows up in in Hindi as ‘das’ and you see the same pattern 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 Iceland to India, form one family, called Indo-European. They can even reconstruct an earlier ancestor of these languages: Proto-Indo-European.