The roots forgotten

Human beings have thousands of ways to express themselves, after all there are thousands of spoken languages in the world. It's interesting to know how these languages evolved. Unfortunately, no one knows the exact answer and to trace the roots, one can only make guesses by looking at the grammar and words.

One of the first instances when I observed similarity in the words of English and Hindi was actually a doha by Kabir in school syllabus:

nindak niyare raakhiye, aangan kuTi chhabaay |
bin paani saabun bina, nirmal kare subhaay ||

(you should be surrounded by your critics for they will clean you without water and soap)

Here the word niyare stands for vicinity or nearness. And that's what surprised me. Later on, in my syllabus itself I learnt that in Russian, fire is called agni.

Another interesting word I have investigated in several languages is Potato, which is Patata in Italian and Spanish, Patates in Turkish and Potatis in Swedish, but more interestingly (not surprisingly though) Batata in Marathi as well as Portuguese! How did aaloo come then? This made me search the net and I found that it came from Sanskrit (read this post, completely devoted to aaloo).

Observe that all the languages mentioned above belong, by and large, to Indo-European family and most linguists agree on the way languages have been classified into families. So what surprised me is a similarity between a word in Hindi/Urdu and Moré, a West African language. In Turkish and Moré, which belongs to the family entirely different from Indo-European, world is called duniyaa! How come? I don't know.

Times changed, people moved from here to there, carried some words with them and left some. The process continued and languages kept getting new shapes. "Apni marzi se kahaan apne safar ke hum hain"...... and so are the languages!