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The Origins and Evolution of European Languages
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16481 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
5 / 1989 |
4,093 Words |
| Author
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Colin Renfrew
Colin Renfrew is the Disney Professor of Archaeology at the
University of Cambridge. His recent book expanding on this
essay's theme is Archaeology and Language: The Puzzle of Indo-
European Origins (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987). |
Throughout the Western world there is a renewed interest in investigating family origins; the tracing of family trees, genealogy, has become a major business. In the United States in particular, with its great mix of ethnic backgrounds, the wider issue of ethnic origins is important: Most Americans aspire to visit that plot of land--whether in Ireland, as it was for the Kennedys and the Reagans, or in Poland, Greece, or West Africa--which was the home of their forefathers.
When we are discussing peoples and national identity--in short, ethnicity--there are few factors more important than language. And it is a surprising fact that nearly all the languages of Europe are related to each other. However different French may seem to us from German, or English from Armenian, or Greek from Russian, it can be shown by careful comparison of grammar and vocabulary, and by a consideration of systematic changes in pronunciation over the years (phonology), that they are related. So close, in fact, are these relationships that most historical linguists agree that most European languages must share a common origin.
Moreover, the relationships extend even more widely and include many of the languages of India and Pakistan. The story goes back more than two hundred years, to 1786, when Sir William Jones, an English judge living in Calcutta, announced a remarkable discovery that he had made while studying Sanskrit, the language of the earliest writings of India (written as early as the fourth century A.D.). As he put it:
The Sanskrit language, whatever may be its antiquity, is of
a wonderful structure; more copious than the Latin, and
more perfect than the Greek, and more exquisitely refined
than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger
affinity, both in the roots of verb and in the forms of
grammar, than could possibly have been produced by
accident; so strong indeed that no philologer could examine
all three, without believing them to have sprung from some
common source.
Two centuries of linguistic study have confirmed this striking observation: Greek, Latin, Sanskrit (along with many late Indian languages, including Hindi, Urdu, and Bengali),
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