Sir William Jones, language families, and Indo-European

Abstract

This paper will reevaluate Jones’s famous 1786 formulation and his other findings that essentially founded modern linguistics. Building on ideas about language relationships that had been voiced for two millennia, but casting these and his own interdisciplinary findings into the form of a theory, his 1786 formulation was a refined, tested form of an experimental hypothesis based on a systematic phonological and morphological comparison of words and inflections primarily from Sanskrit, Latin, Greek, and various stages of Persian, anticipatory of Grimm. He rejected divine explanation and chance and explained massive language similarities on the basis of an earlier source in common. Heavily influenced by Linnaean taxonomy, he postulated that languages can change and die, like organisms, and innovationally grouped similar languages into separate families, rather than to leave them unexplained as thousands of unrelated languages around the world. The family to which he gave his greatest attention was Indo-European, projecting branches like Celtic, Indie, Germanic, Iranian, Hellenic, Italic, etc. He mapped out the IE family, people, homeland, and even migration patterns to help explain language change. His theory is one of the most important in the history of ideas and ultimately marked the end of the conception that God gave Hebrew to Adam as a direct gift of the first language, initiating the separation of religion from linguistics, which could then move toward science.