From Sanskrit to English
Discovering Indo-European
In 1786 a British judge in India noticed that Sanskrit words for father, mother and three looked strikingly like Latin.
Chapter 1
Calcutta, 1786
Studying Sanskrit in Calcutta, William Jones found it resembled Greek and Latin too closely for chance: all three must have “sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists”. That source came to be called Proto-Indo-European.
| Sanskrit | mātṛ́ |
| Latin | māter |
| Ancient Greek | mḗtēr |
| Old Irish | máthir |
| Russian | mat’ |
| Western Farsi | mādar |
| Tokharian B | mācer |
| English | mother |
Chapter 2
Grimm’s law
Why does Latin pater, piscis, pēs line up with English father, fish, foot? In 1822 Jacob Grimm — the elder of the fairy-tale brothers — set out the rule: the Germanic languages turned Proto-Indo-European *p into f, *t into th, *k into h. Sound change, it turned out, is regular.
| Latin | English |
|---|---|
| pater | father |
| piscis | fish |
| pēs | foot |
| trēs | three |
| centum | hundred |
| cornū | horn |
Chapter 3
A homeland on the steppe
Proto-Indo-European was spoken roughly six to five thousand years ago. The prevailing “steppe hypothesis” puts its speakers north of the Black and Caspian Seas, spreading with the horse and the wheeled wagon; the rival “Anatolian hypothesis” has it spreading with early farming from present-day Turkey. Ancient DNA has lately favoured the steppe.
Chapter 4
The easternmost, the oldest
The family reached further than you might think. Tocharian, its easternmost branch, was spoken in the oasis cities of Xinjiang and left Buddhist manuscripts; Hittite, the oldest attested, was pressed into Anatolian clay over three thousand years ago. Both are extinct — and both are crucial to reconstructing the parent language.
Chapter 5
Across the oceans
Today about four in ten people speak an Indo-European language natively — largely the work of the last five hundred years, as English, Spanish, Portuguese and French crossed the oceans with colonial expansion, crowding out thousands of local languages.