TEM-4 Reading 4 (5篇).docVIP

TEXT A All Sir William Jones wanted to do was to learn Sanskrit. While he was studying, however, he made a surprising discovery. This ancient language of India was amazingly similar to Latin and Greek. The Sanskrit word for mother—matar—was almost identical to the Latin word, mater. “Father” was pitar in Sanskrit, pater in Latin and Greek. The more he studied, the more similarities he found. How could this be? Thousands of miles and many natural barriers separated India and Europe. Still, Jones concluded, the similarities were too strong to be accidental. In 1786, he announced “No one could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source.” Since then, scholars have traced many languages to this “common source.” Today, these languages are called the Indo-European family. But where did this source originate? Language and geography provide the clues. European languages have similar words for the animals and trees of northern Europe, such as oak, willow, bear, and wolf. There are no common words for the animals and trees of southern Europe. To scholars, this suggests that the Indo-European languages began in north central Europe. In time, some northern Europeans set out toward the east, settling in Iran, India, and Pakistan. Others migrated westward toward southern and western Europe. The root language developed into dozens of different languages, but the family resemblances remain. The word for “three” is drei in German, tres in Spanish, tre in Albanian, and tri in Russian. Almost every language in Europe is part of the Indo-European family, but there are exceptions. Hungarian and Finnish cling to other language families. High in the Pyrenees, the Basque people speak a language that has no known relatives. Perhaps the Basques were the original inhabitants of the region. Isolated by mountains, they may have been bypassed by the spread of Indo-European culture. 1. What did Sir William Jones discover when he was learning Sanskrit? A.