Sir William Jones

Assembled from 21 blocks · 1 evidence · 33 related

1. Story
2. English judge, orientalist and philologist (1746–1794), who served on the supreme court in Calcutta and founded the Asiatick Society of Bengal in 1784. His Third Anniversary Discourse, delivered in February 1786, contains the sentence that is conventionally taken to open comparative linguistics: that Sanskrit bears to Greek and Latin a stronger affinity, in verb roots and grammatical forms, than could possibly have been produced by accident, and that all three have sprung from some common source which perhaps no longer exists. Two things about the claim deserve emphasis. Jones was not the first to notice the resemblance — European travellers and missionaries had remarked on Sanskrit's similarity to Latin and Greek for two centuries before him — and the discourse itself offers no method: no correspondence sets, no reconstruction, no rules. What Jones supplied was the correct inference, stated with authority in a form that reached scholars who could act on it, and in particular the crucial move of positing a lost common ancestor rather than deriving one attested language from another. The method that could prove it came from Copenhagen, Göttingen and Leipzig over the following century.
3. Knowledge
4. The comparative method
5. Sir William Jones
6. Connections
7. The comparative method
8. Jones states the Indo-European hypothesis in Calcutta
9. Language death
10. Contact, borrowing and the limits of resemblance
11. The regularity of sound change
12. Bayesian phylogenetic dating of language families
13. Sino-Tibetan
14. Afroasiatic
15. Proto-Indo-European
16. Sir William Jones
17. The Neogrammarian doctrine: sound laws admit no exception
18. Glottochronology proposes to date language splits arithmetically
19. Language in the Americas, and its rejection
20. Evidence
21. Supports the statement that Jones argued in 1786 for a common lost source of Sanskrit, Greek and Latin on the evidence of verb roots and grammatical forms. V55 verification basis: this session had no access to any source — WebFetch was egress-blocked for every host attempted and the WebSearch budget was exhausted before authoring — so the cited work was not retrieved, and no page, volume or figure quoted from it was re-checked. The discourse is paraphrased, never quoted verbatim, and the delivery date of 2 February 1786 is taken from the standard accounts rather than from the publication itself.