European scholars in the Middle Ages looked
to several ancient tongues, including Hebrew,
as possible candidates for the original proto-
language. During the Renaissance, European
scholars were able to turn up more clues as trade
networks expanded. Increased travel to India
surfaced similarities between Sanskrit and sev-
eral European languages. In the 1580s Filippo
Sassetti, an Italian merchant, noticed similar
sounding words, and he recorded Sanskrit terms
similar to their Italian equivalents:
deva/dio (god/deity), sarpa/serpe (ser-
pent), sapta/sette (seven), and nava/
nove (new).Mother Tongue
Scholars have a long history of searching for the
time and place when one mother language was
spoken by all living people. Writing during his
travels to Egypt in the fifth century B.C., Greek
historian Herodotus described the efforts of the
Egyptian pharaoh Psamtik I (Psammetichus in
Greek), who ruled in the seventh century B.C.,
to uncover humanity’s primal language. Psam-
tik gave two infants to a shepherd to raise. The
children would be fed and cared for, but no one
was to speak to them. The pharaoh believed that
when the children first spoke, their words would
reveal humanity’s original tongue.POLYGLOT
PIONEER
William Jones was
one of the first
scholars to note links
between diverse
languages. He was
47 when his portrait
(below) was painted
in 1793, a year before
his death.STRIKING
COMPARISONS
FINDING THE WORDSI
n Calcutta (Kolkata), India, on February 2,
1786, Sir William Jones addressed the
Asiatic Society of Bengal and made a now
famous remark on the common origins of
Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit: “The Sanscrit [sic]
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 in the forms of grammar,
than could possibly have been produced by
accident; so strong indeed, that no philologer
could examine them all three, without believ-
ing them to have sprung from some common
source, which, perhaps, no longer exists; there
is a similar reason, though not quite so forc-
ible, for supposing that both the Gothic and
the Celtic, though blended with a very differ-
ent idiom, had the same origin with the San-
scrit; and the old Persian might be added to
the same family.”CIRCA A.D. 500
Tocharian
(above)
CIRCA A.D. 500
Balto-Slavic
Old Church Slavonic
(above)CIRCA A.D. 600
Germanic
Runic
(above)CIRCA A.D. 600
Armenian
Classical Armenian,
Grabar (above)Tosk dialect
(above)BRIDGEMAN/ACI