The Mother Tongue Read Online Free PDF Page A

two and are never troubled by it again. Intriguingly, all creole languages make precisely the same distinction.
    Al of would seem to suggest that certain properties of lan-guage are innate. Moreover, as we have seen, it appears that the earth's languages may be more closely related than once thought.
    The links between languages—between, say, German bruder, En-glish brother, Gaelic bhrathair, Sanskrit bhrata, and Persian biradar—seem self-evident to us today but it hasn't always been so. The science of historical linguistics, like so much else, owes its beginnibgs to the work of an amateur enthusiast, in this case to an Englishman named Sir William Jones.
    Dispatched to India as a judge in 1783, Jones whiled away his evenings by teaching himself Sanskrit. On the face of it, this was an odd and impractical thing to do since Sanskrit was a dead language and had been for many centuries. That so much of it survived at all was in large part due to the efforts of priests who memorized its sacred hymns, the Vedas, and passed them on from one generation THE MOTHER TONGUE
    to the next for hundreds of years even though the words had no meaning for them. These texts represent some of the oldest writ-any Indo-European language
    . Jones, noticed many striking
    similarities between Sanskrit and European languages the San-skrit wordforinstance, was bhurja. The Sanskrit for king,. raja, is close to the Latin rex. The Sanskrit for ten, dasa, is reminiscent of the Latin decem and so on. All of these clearly suggeste a common historical parentage. Jones l00ked at other languages and discovere rt er simi arities. In a landmark speech to the Asiatick Society in Calcutta he proposed that many of the•
    classical languages—among them Sanskrit, Greek Latin, Gothic,
    "Celtic, and Persian—must spring from the same source. This was a bold assertions since nothing in recorded history would encourage such a conclusion, and it excited great interest among scholars all over Europe. The next centu saw a feverish effort to track down
    'the parent language, Indo-European as it was soon called. Scores of people became involved, including noted scholars such as the Germans Friedrich von Schlegel and Jacob Grimm (yes, he of the fairy tales, though philology was his first love) and the splendidly named Franz Bopp. But, once again, some of the most important breakthroughs were the work of inspired amateurs, among them Henry Rawlinson, an official with the British East India Company, who deciphered ancient Persian more or less single-handed, and, somewhat later, Michael Ventris, an English architect who deci-phered the famously difficult Linear B script of ancient Minoa, which had flummoxed generations of academics.
    These achievements are all the more remarkable when you con-sider that often they were made using the merest fragments—of ancient Thracian, an important language spoken over a wide area until as recently as the Middle Ages, we have just twenty-five words—and in the face of remarkable indifference on the part of the ancient Greeks and Romans, neither of whom ever bothered to note the details of a single other language. The Romans even al-lowed ETruscan that had greatly contributed to their
    own, to be lost, so that today Etruscan writings remain tantaliz-ingly untranslated .
    Nor can we read any Indo-European writings, for the simple

    THE DAWN OF LANGUAGE

    THE MOTHER TONGUE

    THE DAWN OF LANGUAGE
    nation state, so they were easily divided and conquered. Even now the various branches of Celtic are not always mutually comprehen-sible. Celtic speakers in Scotland, for instance, cannot understand the Celtic speakers of Wales a hundred miles to the south. Today Celtic survives in scattered outposts along the westernmost fringes of Europe—on the bleak Hebridean Islands and coastal areas of Scotland, in shrinking pockets of Galway, Mayo, Kerry, and Done-gal in Ireland, in mostly remote areas of Wales, and on the Brittany peninsula of northwest