VIDEO TRANSCRIPTION CORRECTED

(TAKEN FROM THE TV PROGRAMME BEFORE BABEL)

Radio Sunrise serves a West London community of mixed races. Punjabi speakers in the midst of an (and a mixed) English suburb. (An incapore of linguist in English in this chapter, see inevitable Romanic ship.) 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 two hundred years ago by a multilingual English lawyer, Sir William Jones.

He was a judge (when) who (he) went out to India in 1783, but he’d studied languages, oriental languages, before he went, and when he got to India, he became very interested and (on) 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 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 (has) 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 (indicate) 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 (before) for “four”. This is one of many examples where a word belonging with “q” in Latin say, is similar to a Greek word beginning with “t”, and a Sanscrit word beginning with “k”. These sound correspondences can reveal (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 (then) therefore (they) 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) inflexions, (similarities) 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 (or) to be believable. If (you take a) we look at an English word like “tooth”, and see that in Hindi it’s “dant”, and that by itself (it) that doesn’t mean that (very) much, but you take a look at English “ten”, (and) which (ends) shows up in Hindi as “das”, and (you see) the same pattern emerging- you have got an initial “t” in English and an initial “d” in Hindi. When you find that the word “two” though, the numeral, in English, shows up in Hindo as (the word) “do”, (you find) once again an initial “t” in English and an initial “d” in Hindi. (and) You begin to think that perhaps this is not an accident.

Linguists have now established that a whole range of languages, (sketching) stretching from Iceland to India form one family called Indoeuropean. They can even reconstruct (the) an earlier ancestor of these languages- (which it’s) Proto Indoeuropean.