TRANSCRIPTION: “INDO-EUROPEAN EXCERPT FROM BEFORE BABEL”
Radio Sunrise serves the West London community of mixed races, Punjabi speakers and the midst of an English suburb. What can these two languages, Punjabi and English, have in common? In fact, English and Punjabi, as well as other languages of nothern India, like Indi or Gudjurati, are related- something discoverd 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 is first written about 500 a.D. and then he realised he made this great discovery that Sanscrit resembles in some way, has relationsip, with Greek and Latin and other languages. And he gave a very famous discourse in which he says 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, bears a strong resemblance with Latin and Greek, on the left; but while one, two and three are obvius; 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 beggining in “q” in Latin say, is similar with a Greek word begining with “t” and to a Sanscrit word begining with “k”. These sound correspondances 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 and their sounds similarities, in their inflections, similarities in the syntax of the language and so forth, and the similarities have to be very precise and have to be interlocking for the assertion that these languages form a family or to be believable. You take a look at an English word like “tooth” and see that in Indi is “dant” and that by itself that doesn’t mean very much; but you take a look at English “ten” which shows up in Hindi as “das” and you see the same pattern emerging: you have an initial “t” in English and an initial “d” in Indi. When you find the word “two”, the numeral, in English shows up in Hindi as “do”, and you have 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 stablished that a whole range of languages, stretching from Iceland to India, form one family called Indo-European. We can even reconstruct an earlier ancestor of these languages Proto-Indo-European.