One of the most interesting outcomes of the colonization of India was the realization that the languages of the sub-continent, especially the northern part of the undivided India, had roots that were very similar to European languages. With the translation of the Rgveda (a sandhi of Rk + Veda; to write it as Rg Veda would be incorrect) and other Vedic and Puranic corpura, it was evident to the Western world for the first time that the Vedic language (which is substantially different from the 'classical' Sanskrit of Kalidasa, Sudraka or Bhasa) shared close affinity with several European languages.
It was Sir Willam Jones who first proposed a common ancestor for a large set of European, Indic and Iranian languages. In his well-known discourse delivered on 2 February 1786, he argued that:
The Sanscrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists; there is a similar reason, though not quite so forcible, for supposing that both the Gothic and the Celtic, though blended with a very different idiom, had the same origin with the Sanscrit; and the old Persian might be added to the same family.
It is interesting to note that this very same passage was instrumental in launching the two new sciences of Comparative Linguistics (a part of the broader domain of Historic Linguistics), and Indo-European studies.
From then until the present, Comparative Linguistics as well as Indo-European studies have made enormous strides. The common ancestor postulated by Sir Jones was named as Proto-Indo-European (PIE), and is now accepted by most scholars as the common ancestor to ten language families that are spoken by over two-thirds of humanity today (see the list below with some examples of each family):
- Celtic (Irish Gaelic)
- Germanic (German, English)
- Italic (Spanish, Italian)
- Hellenic (Greek)
- Balto-slavic (Russian, Lithuanian)
- Indo-Iranian (Persian, Indic languages)
- Armenian
- Balkan (Albanian)
- Anatolian (now extinct)
- Tocharian (now extinct)
It is interesting to note that PIE itself is not attested to in written or spoken form until now. It is likely that it became fragmented into daughter languages by about 3000 BCE.
The efforts of contemporary linguists to reconstruct PIE had been proceeding for the last several decades. This historical reconstruction, interestingly, has also developed and strengthened the pillars of the science of historic linguistics itself.
As outcomes of this reconstruction efforts, there are now several fragments of PIE text, both written and spoken, available for the rest of humanity to see what this language looked and sounded like. Here are two such reconstructions: Sheep and Horses and The King and the God.
There was a lively discussion on the first of these two on Reddit in September 2013. While there was a consensus that the reconstruction did not sound like any existing language, user farangiyeparsi (reddit.com/u/farangiyeparsi) made a very significant observation on the spoken version of the fable based on responses of the listeners who had different language backgrounds:
It seems that it's a mirror for speakers of Indo-European languages. They all hear the roots of their own language, with the ancestors taking precedence.
It has been a fascinating journey for the science of linguistics, from the proposal of a hypothetical common ancestral language last spoken 5000 years ago, to reconstructing it into a 'live' language that seems to be endorsed by the speakers of different daughter languages. Even assuming that this 'mirror' is a first-effort reconstruction, it is indeed quite satisfying--even exciting--to note that it resonates with different language communities around the world. This is indeed the triumph of the whole domain of Comparative Linguistics.
