’’It all began with a germ of an idea that languages, like people, are related,’’ says Gray who, along with a colleague, treated language as if it was DNA and compared selected words from 87 languages to build an evolutionary tree of Indo-European languages.
Then, 2,449 words from languages including English, Hindi and Gujarati underwent comparisons to build up a pattern of descent. The choice of words was critical says Gray, as ’’this determined who picked up the language and spread its evolving versions across Europe and Asia.’’
Faced with a new theory on Hindi’s origins, Hindi scholars and linguists are skeptical about Gray’s findings. ’’Hindi, as a language, has always been associated with the Indo-Aryan family, with its origin in the Rig Vedas and Sanskrit,’’ says professor emeritus Namwer Singh of JNU, ’’What we speak today, Khariboli, has evolved from three distinct stages of Sanskrit, Prakrit and Apabhransh.’’
Corroborating Singh’s interpretation are tomes shelved at the Linguistic Survey of India compiled by George Abraham Greerson, a British civil servant. Besides, Suniti Kumar Chatterjee’s research on Hindi arrives at the same conclusion as Greerson.
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