How was the Indo-European language family discovered?

The family was recognised gradually. European scholars, many working in India, noticed that Sanskrit shared words and grammar with Greek, Latin and Germanic languages in ways that chance and borrowing could not explain. In 1786 the lawyer William Jones stated the idea in a famous passage, and 19th-century philologists then turned it into a systematic method. Jones is often called the discoverer, but specialists note that the idea has a longer history. [1] [2]

William Jones was a British scholar and lawyer appointed to the Supreme Court at Calcutta in 1783. He learned Sanskrit in order to understand the Hindu legal tradition. In 1786 he gave a paper to the Asiatic Society of Calcutta saying that Sanskrit, whatever its antiquity, had a stronger affinity to Greek and Latin, in both verb roots and grammatical forms, than could have arisen by accident. He concluded that no philologer could examine the three without believing they had sprung from some common source which perhaps no longer existed. He added that Gothic and Celtic, and possibly Old Persian, probably belonged to the same family. [3] [2]

Scholars in India such as Gaston Coeurdoux and Jones already knew the ties among European languages. They were struck to find echoes of Latin, Greek and German in Sanskrit words such as mātṛ (mother), bhrātṛ (brother) and duhitṛ (daughter). The languages had had no recent contact, so borrowing was implausible. The correspondences were also regular: Sanskrit bh matched Germanic b, and Sanskrit p matched Latin and Greek p but Germanic f. The only explanation was descent from a common ancestor. [1]

In the 19th century Rasmus Rask, Franz Bopp and August Schleicher systematised these observations. By comparing the changes in each descendant language, they showed that the words of the lost ancestor, now called Proto-Indo-European, could be reconstructed. This work laid the foundations of modern historical linguistics. [1]

The popular view credits Jones with establishing the family and founding comparative linguistics. Lyle Campbell argues this is mistaken. He lists many writers who observed connections among European languages before Jones, including Dante, Scaliger and Stiernhielm. He also notes that the Sanskrit link to Greek and Latin had been recognised earlier by figures such as Thomas Stephens, Filippo Sassetti, Coeurdoux and Nathaniel Halhed, and that at least 47 accounts of Sanskrit had been published before Jones's statement. Campbell adds that Jones's methods differed from the later comparative method and were not original to him. [2]

Campbell still grants that Jones used three kinds of evidence that remain the foundation of work on language relationships: basic vocabulary, grammatical agreement and some notion of sound correspondence. He also notes that Jones made many errors in his classifications. A separate scholarly view, from Thomas Trautmann, stresses that British India was fertile ground because European language analysis met the sophisticated Indian tradition of language analysis. [2] [4]