The language had already been dead for hundreds of years, yet it managed to survive thanks to the priests who’d memorized certain hymns, called the Vedas.
Sir William Jones was working in India when he took up the unusual hobby of learning Sanskrit. Why are these words so similar? An eighteenth-century English judge wondered the same thing – and his attempt to answer that question essentially launched the field of historical linguistics. Take the word “brother.” In German it’s “bruder,” in Sanskrit it’s “bhrata,” and in Persian it’s “biradar.”
One age-old indicator of a near-global connection is language. This may well be the case, but that doesn’t mean that connectedness is anything new.
Many people will tell you that today’s world is more connected than ever before.
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