Radio Sunrise
serves the
West London community of mixed races ____ speakers in the midst of an
English
_____. What could these two languages, ____ and English, have in common?
In
fact, English and _____, as well as other languages of Northern India
like
and _______ 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 ______, which is the language of ancient India,
which was
first written about
It’s surprising
that no
one ____________ earlier. Take the numbers again, for example, the
_____ , 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 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”, or a ______ 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 for, and the similarities have to be very precise, and
they
have to be _____for the ______ that these languages form a family to be
believable. If we look at an English word like“tooth”, and see that
_____,
and that by itself that doesn’t mean that much, but you take a look at
English “ten”,
which ends up in Hindi as ____, 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” though, the new word, in English, shows up in____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, ______ from Ireland to
India form
one family called Indoeuropean. We can even construct the earlier
ancestor of
these languages Proto Indoeuropean.