Read the text and answer the questions.
It is believed that earth’s languages are quite closely related. The links between
languages, e.g. between German ‘Bruder’, English ‘brother’, Gaelic ‘bhrathair’,
Sanskrit ‘bhrata’, and Persian ‘biradar’, seem self-evident1 to us today but it hasn’t
always been so. The science of historical linguistics owes its beginnings to the work
of an amateur enthusiast – an Englishman named Sir William Jones.
Dispatched2 to India as a judge in 1783, Jones learned Sanskrit. This was, actually,
an odd and impractical thing to do since Sanskrit was a dead language and had been
for many centuries. Jones noticed many striking similarities between Sanskrit and
European languages – the Sanskrit word for birch, for instance, was bhurja. The
Sanskrit for king, raja, is close to the Latin rex. All of these clearly suggested a
common historical parentage. Jones looked at other languages and discovered
further similarities. In a landmark3 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
assertion4 since nothing in recorded history would encourage such a conclusion, and
it excited great interest among scholars all over Europe. The next century saw a
feverish5 effort to track down the parent language, Indo-European, as it was soon
called.
(adapted from: Bryson, Bill. 1990. The Mother Tongue. New York: Avon Books.)
1. Who is believed to be the father of historical linguistics?
2. What is Sanskrit?
3. What let Jones think that European languages and Sanskrit have the same
source?
Match the words into collocations.
1. striking
2. landmark
3. bold
4. recorded
5. feverish
A. speech
B. history
C. similarity
D. effort
E. assertion
1. … 2. … 3. … 4. … 5. …
1
evident without proof or argument
sent away
3
having great import or significance
4
something declared or stated positively, often with no support or attempt at proof
5
marked by intense agitation or emotion
2