Sir William Jones (September 28, 1746 - April 27, 1794) was a British philologist and student of ancient India, particularly known for his discovery of the Indo-European languages family.

Jones was born in London, his father (also named Sir William Jones) was a mathematician. The young William Jones was a linguistic prodigy, learning Greek, Latin, Persian, Arabic and the basic of Chinese writing at an early age. By the end of his life he was reported to be able to speak twenty-eight languages.

Though his father died when he was only three, Jones was still able to go to university. Graduating from University College, Oxford in 1764, he embarked on a career as a tutor and translator for the next six years. During this time he published Histoire de Nader Chah, a translation of a work originally written in Persian and done at the request of King Christian VII of Denmark who had visited Jones - who by the age of 22 had already required a reputation as orientalist - into French. This would be the first of numerous works on Persia, Turkey, and the Middle East in general.

For three years starting in 1770 he studied law, which would eventually lead him to his life work in India; after a spell as a circuit judge in Wales (and a fruitless attempt to resolve the issues of the American Revolution in concert with Benjamin Franklin in Paris), he was appointed to the Supreme Court of Bengal in 1783.

There he was entranced by Indian culture, a then untouched field of European scholarship, and he founded the Asiatick Society of Bengal. Over the next ten years he would produce a flood of works on India, launching the modern study of the subcontinent in virtually every social science. He also wrote on the local laws, music, literature, botany, and geography, and made the first English translations of several important works of Indian literature.

Of all his discoveries, Jones is best known today for making and propagating the observation that Sanskrit bore a certain resemblance to Greek and Latin. In The Sanscrit Language (1786) he suggested that all three languages had a common root, and that further they might all be related in turn to Gothic and Celtic languages, and to Persian. His third discourse published in 1798 with its famous "philologer" passage is often sited as the beginning of comparative linguistics and Indo-European studies. Athough the Dutchman Marcus Zuerius van Boxhorn (1612-1653) and others had had been aware that Ancient Persian belonged to the same language group as the European languages no later than the mid-17th century, and American colonist Jonathan Edwards Jr., published in 1787, had demonstrated that Algonquian and Iroquoian language families (families not merely languages) were related with supporting data (which Jones lacked), Jones' discovery really popularized the Indo-European language family, and was perhaps the first important use of the technique of comparative philology.

Jones is also indirectly responsible for some of the feel of the English Romantic movement's poetry (including the likes of Lord Byron and Samuel Taylor Coleridge), as his translations of "eastern" poetical works were a source for that style.

References

• Campbell, Lyle. (1997). American Indian languages: The historical linguistics of Native America. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-1950-9427-1.
• Cannon, Garland H. (1964). Oriental Jones: A biography of Sir William Jones, 1746-1794. Bombay: Asia Pub. House Indian Council for Cultural Relations.
• Cannon, Garland H. (1979). Sir William Jones: A bibliography of primary and secondary sources. Amsterdam: Benjamins. ISBN 9-0272-0998-7.
• Cannon, Garland H.; & Brine, Kevin. (1995). Objects of enquiry: Life, contributions and influence of Sir William Jones. New York: New York University Press. ISBN 0-8147-1517-6.
• Franklin, Michael J. (1995). Sir William Jones. Cardiff: University of Wales Press. ISBN 0-7083-1295-0.
• Jones, William, Sir. (1970). The letters of Sir William Jones. Cannon, Garland H. (Ed.). Oxford: Clarendon P. ISBN 0-1981-2404-X.
• Mukherjee, S. N. (1968). Sir William Jones: A study in eighteenth-century British attitudes to India. London, Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-5210-5777-9.

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