The reading for this week was very compelling in the sense that it made me reflect on the history of my own language. Having spoken Nepali every since I was born, I never thought about the origins of Nepali, and how it came about to become the national language of Nepal. However, this week reading encouraged me to do some more research on Nepali, while describing how language families work. The most common way of studying language families are through the comparative method - a way of systematically comparing a series of languages in order to prove a historical relationship between them.
The book describes the proto-indo-European language as the earlier language and explains how Sanskrit, the oldest attested language of the Indian subcontinent has been noted as early as 16th century. He writes, “The Sanskrit language has 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 believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps no longer exists.”
The book then explains how Indo European family is organized by comparing similar vocabulary, and draws a conclusion about the geographical origins and life styles of the people. It describes the roots and origins of various language including Albanian, Armenian, Anatolian, Celtic, Germanic, Greek, Indo-Iranian, Italic and Tocharian. It depicts the history, family and organization of various languages. Reading about the different languages made me wonder about my own language and I ended up doing research on Nepali.
Nepali mostly spoken in Nepal, Bhutan, India and Myanmar is a language in the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European language family. Spoken widely throughout Nepal, the language is regarded as the Pahari language - a language spoken across the lower elevation of the Himalaya range. The language although has similar roots with Hindi – Sanskrit, is more conservation with more Sanskrit derivations and fewer Persian or English derivations. Written in Devanagari script, Nepali became prominent language when Prithvi Narayan Shah, the ruler of Gorkha, unified divided Nepal into a single country in 1769 A.D, and announced the language of Gorkha- Nepali, to be the official language of Nepal.
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