Transcription.

Voice: Radio Sunrises serves a West London community of mixed races, Punjabi speakers and the mids ........... English suburb. One 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 Gujarati are related. Something discovered by chance two hundred years ago by a multilingual English Lawyer, Sibling Jones.

Prof. Colin Renfrew (Universidad de Cambridge): “He was a judge who went out to India in 1783 but he studied languages, oriental languages, before he when he gone to India he became very interested and learnt Sanskrit 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 Sanskrit resembles in any way its  relationship with Greek and Latin and other languages and he gave a very famous discourse in which he said that this was sprung from some common source.”

Voice: It’s surprising that no one spotted these resemblances earlier. Take the numbers again for example:

unus      heis       ekas

duo        dua        dva

tres        treis      tryas

The Sanskrit, on the right, ..... a strong resemblance to Latin and Greek, on the left. But while one, two and three are obvious, four and five indicates a closed spot the connection. Linguists should discover rules that govern our 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 it’s similar to a Greek word beginning with ”t” and the Sanskrit word beginning with “k”. These sound correspondences can reveal how apparently unrelated languages are members of the same family.

Don Ringe Jr. (Universidad de Pennsylvania):  The question is how can you tell that the languages that you are looking at reflect a singular original language 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 and their sounds similarities in other inflections, 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 to be believable. We take a look at an English word like “tooth” and see that in Hindi is “dant” and by itself doesn’t mean very much. But you take a look at our English “ten” and it chose up in Hindi as “das” and the same pattern emerging, you have got an initial “t” in English and a initial “d” in Hindi. When you find that the word “two” though, the numeral in English, shows up in Hindi as “do”, once again an initial “t” in English and an initial “d” in Hindi. You begin to think that perhaps this is not an accident.

English                 Hindi

tooth                    dant

ten                        das