A sudden injection of wordplay

Bad mimics, attempting generic Welsh or Indian voices, sometimes confuse the two, aware of their similar sing-songiness but failing to get it quite right. It so happens that we have Welsh neighbours, and also Sikh ones, none of whom conform to these crude stereotypes but who all speak English with very slight accents indicative of their backgrounds.

What astonished me the other day was when one of the Sikh children, proud to tell me she was learning the Punjabi (Gurmukhi) alphabet, counted out for me the numbers from one to ten. “I’ve heard that before” was my surprised response – my grandad, who was born near Port Talbot, taught the sequence to me when I was little. Welsh !

Well, something like it, anyway. I decided to put together a chart for comparison:

	Welsh	Punjabi
1	un	ikk
2	dau	do
3	tri	tinn
4	pedwar	char
5	pump	panj
6	chwech	chhe
7	saith	satt
8	wyth	athth
9	naw	naum
10	deg	das

You will notice some words that don’t map across very well, but there are other close similarities between some of them and their equivalents in ancient Latin, Greek or Sanskrit (as well as in many modern Romance and Indian languages, not to mention German or Russian). For instance, the Punjabi for 4, char, shows similarities to the Latin quattuor and the Sanskrit catur; most revealingly, for 5, Greek has pente and Sanskrit pancha. For 10, Greek has deca, Latin decem, and Sanskrit dasha.

 
Naturally I’ve been aware of the common roots of many Indo-European languages for a long time, but it was a surprise to find, just across the road from each other, one set of numbers known to a family with origins in South Wales, and a very similar set spoken by a family with origins in the Punjab (“five rivers”) region of northern India. Perhaps it’s another take on “small world syndrome”. Because it is a very small world, it’s the only one we’ve got, and it needs looking after.