Sir William Jones

person · earth

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.

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