William Jones

William Jones proposed that Sanskrit, Greek and Latin descended from a common ancestor, which is the founding statement of comparative linguistics. He was a prodigy - Greek, Latin, Persian, Arabic and Hebrew before he left Oxford, and eventually a working knowledge of dozens of languages - and he made his early reputation translating Persian poetry for a European audience that had barely encountered it. He trained as a barrister because scholarship did not pay, held radical opinions on American independence and parliamentary reform that cost him preferment, and in 1783 was appointed a judge of the Supreme Court at Fort William in Calcutta. He founded the Asiatic Society of Bengal the following year. In the third anniversary discourse, in 1786, he observed that Sanskrit bore to Greek and Latin a stronger affinity than could possibly have been produced by accident, in the verbal roots and the grammar both, and that all three had probably sprung from some common source which no longer existed. The idea was not entirely without precedent, but his statement of it was the one that started a discipline. He also translated the Laws of Manu and Kalidasa's Shakuntala, the latter of which was rendered into German and read by Goethe and Herder, and did more than any other single text to give European Romanticism its idea of India. His judicial work had a purpose of the same kind and a more ambiguous legacy: he wanted British courts in India to apply Hindu and Muslim law from the sources rather than through interpreters he did not trust, and the digests he commissioned helped freeze a fluid legal tradition into a codified one. He died in Calcutta at forty-seven of an inflamed liver. He had drafted a plan for a complete digest of Hindu and Muslim law and did not live to finish it. His Persian grammar remained the standard English work on the language for half a century.

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