The Eureka Moment of Linguistics

The story of how Europeans discovered that their languages were related to languages in India and Iran.

Credits:
Researcher - Aryus
Narrator - Richard Turner
Video Editor - Gautam Bhatti
Persian Audio - Behnaz Noroozi
Dutch Audio - Nick Pruim
Sanskrit and Latin Audio - Echuidor
Italian Audio - Federico C.

Research Document:

Music:

Chapters:
00:00 European Classification
01:19 Indian Connections
02:58 Persian-German Theory
05:41 Scythian Theory
11:11 Proto-Language
12:43 The Final Stages
14:52 William Jones

[aaronmarks]

I'm a professional linguist and have taught the story of William Jones dozens of times to undergraduates. Yet I find the 1686 quote by Andreas Jäger astounding: he perceived the outlines, origins, and migrations of the Indo-European family - as well as, even more impressively, the mechanism of language change and differentiation - far more astutely than William Jones, and did it a full century earlier. His quote could easily be from a linguist working today. I'm shocked that, to my recollection, I have never seen mention of Andreas Jäger or his quote in any introductory linguistics text, even ones focused on historical linguistics. I'll be adding it to my curriculum immediately :) Thank you for sharing this fascinating history!

[ganelonhb]

When I was a kid, I learned a bunch of German words and deduced that German must be descended from the same family as English. I told my Dad my theory and he told me that it was dumb and probably not true 😂

[paulussturm]

Growing up as a Serbian kid interested in languages I had two huge eureka moments. The first came about when I met a Slovak kid on vacation and we figured out that if we spoke slowly we could understand each other. That was a trip. But nothing compared to what I felt when I kinda figured out Italian. We listened to a whole lot of Italian music in the car and me and my brother just kinda picked up the words from rote repetition. We figured out we could sorta rearrange them and make sentences that still made sense. Obviously we made a bunch of mistakes but that’s besides the point. Anyway my father noticed and asked us to explain how we figured it out. And we just intuitively began using analogies with Serbian. At some point it just clicked how easy it was to explain it like that. I literally got chills and I knew I had figured something out. When I got a computer and internet the first thing I ever searched on google was the serbian connection to Italian. I fell into the rabbit hole and never looked back.

[sormazi]

There is a verse in the Rg Veda that speaks of Dasharajanya (or the war of ten kings) where it's mentioned that one of the tribes that lost the war, "Parashua" (which means, a battle axe in Samskrita) was exiled to the "west". "Parashua" sounds oddly similar to Parsa, as the Persians themselves referred to their land. It is also curious how Avestan or old Persian sounds remarkably similar to Samskrita.
There is also a Rg Vedic diety called "Dyush Pitr" which sounds remarkably similar to "Deus Patr" or "Jupiter"

[adlovett]

Currently learning persian. I told my parents and my father said it is a dialect of Arabic. I told him flatly no, it is more closely related to English than Arabic. He got annoyed and said "I guess my tour of the persian gulf means nothing then?"😅

[Marcus]

Leibniz is a legend, doing Calculus and Linguistics at the same time.

[Seidazdarevic]

5:32 "Nemçe" is actually a Slavic word, but it was used in Turkish during the Ottoman times.

[majidbineshgar]

What amazes me is that Persian demonstrates cognate similarities both to Germanic and Romance languages such as Infinitive both with the suffixes*an and * ar ( Germanic *en, Latin *ar ) Ke, Ku, Kodam, Ki (= Que, Quo, Quodam, Qui in Latin ), Chera ( Quare in Latin ), Che, Chi, Chun ( Cum in Latin ), Pour ( Puer in Latin ) but Doxtar cognate to Daughter / Tochter in Germanic, ra / re ( re in Latin ) Dast ( Dexter in Latin), Mard ( = Mar in Latin ), Beh ( Bea in Latin ) but Bad in Persian = Bad / Bose in Germanic, Kar ( Guer in Latin ), Pas ( Pax in Latin ), Prefix * Dosh- ( Dis- in Latin) ..., Abrouw ( Eybrow in English ), Nist ( nicht, niet, ...), Budan ( to be), am ( am in English ), Abar ( Uber in Germanic ), the Prefix Fer-/ Far- ( Ver- in Germanic ), prefix Be- coincide with that of Germanic languages, Prefix Ge-/ geo - ( Germanic Ge-) , Az ( Aus in Germanic ), *Dan - ( *Den - in Germanik = think, know ) the comparatives with ¡tar (-or in Latin, er in Germanic, Behtar ( Better in English ), the negative " Ich" ( modern Persian Hich ) = ikke / ekke in Scandinavian languages, Ja/ Gah ( Geo in Greek ) ...and many many more .

[thewelldweller]

one of the best videos about the history of the discovery of the indo-european language family tree that I have seen

[josepheridu]

Great video, and thank you. I love how we can infer technology from Proto-Indo-Europeans, such as they having a word for wheel suggests that they had that technology.

[zADIA]

Phenomenal video. I look forward to seeing this channel grow in the future

[barnsleyman]

criminally small channel for such a high production value! excellent and in-depth information, you have a radio voice, you should've been using it from the beginning ;)

[MisterTipp]

I love it when the algorithm pushes you a new channel with interesting content! Subbed!

[haitike]

This one was very interesting. I had read some of the last ones, but I had never seen a collection of all of them, even the early ones. Great job as always.

[bestcocbaseswithlink]

Greeting to all fellow indoeuropeans from Nepal!

[BlueBird-qk]

Its funny because even today as iranic i see a lot of similarity s between iranic and Germanic languages much more than other European branches of indo - European

[GMPOFloyd]

5:13 This is the opening theme for the Paradox's Europa Universalis II game. It brings me lots of memories of me trying to conquer the world in the Modern period, thank you so much for including the title, I have always looked for it.

[bun]

Witch burnings literally started in the renaissance. This idea that it was “secular” is sort of a load of nonsense. It’s just an axiomatic conflation of modern secularism with all progress in terms of science etc. Because of the reformation there was more religious fervour, conflict and writing than most of the middle ages.

[gabrielmaximianobielkael]

Omg, new video! Ive been waiting for so long

[fish.enjoyer]

This work is absolutely incredible and so well researched. I just have to see more stuff like this. You've earned yourself a sub.