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Oriental Jones and the 1786 Discourse That Linked Sanskrit to Greek

Sir William Jones's 1786 remark on Sanskrit, Greek and Latin is often called the birth of Indo-European. The full discourse, its predecessors and its colonial setting tell a messier story.

By · Published · 9 min read

On 2 February 1786, the president of a young learned society in Calcutta stood up to give his third annual address. He was Sir William Jones, a judge of the Supreme Court in Bengal, already the leading English scholar of Persian and Arabic, the man later biographers would call “Oriental Jones.” His subject that evening was the Hindus. One paragraph from the talk, about 140 words long, has since been quoted in nearly every introduction to historical linguistics as the moment the Indo-European language family was discovered.12

That reputation is only partly deserved. Read in full, the discourse makes claims that no linguist accepts, rests on ideas others had voiced before him, and belongs to a colonial project whose purposes Jones stated openly. It is still a remarkable document, and the reasons it was remembered are worth separating from the reasons it was right.

A scholar of Persian on the Company’s bench

Jones was born in London in 1746 and made his name early as a linguist.32 In 1771, as a Fellow of University College, Oxford, he published A Grammar of the Persian Language. Its preface is frank about where the demand came from. Letters from Indian rulers were written in Persian, and servants of the East India Company “received letters which they could not read”; moreover, “it was found highly dangerous to employ the natives as interpreters, upon whose fidelity they could not depend.” Jones promised that a student following his plan could, within a year, “answer any letter from an Indian prince.”4

In March 1783 he was appointed a judge of the Supreme Court of Judicature at Fort William in Bengal and knighted for the post.3 He left England in April 1783 and landed at Calcutta that September.3 In January 1784 he and a group of British residents founded the Asiatick Society at Calcutta, modeled on the learned academies of Europe. The founders wrote to Governor-General Warren Hastings and his Council asking them to act as patrons; the signatures on that letter are all British names, Jones’s and Charles Wilkins’s among them. Hastings accepted the patronage but declined the presidency, which went to Jones. The first volume of the Society’s Asiatick Researches, dated 1788 on its title page, came off the Company’s own printing press.5

The famous paragraph, in its place

The discourse was the first of a planned series on what Jones called the five principal nations of Asia, with the aim of tracing them back to a common center. Language was only one of four kinds of evidence he used, alongside religion and philosophy, monuments, and the sciences and arts.12 The paragraph everyone quotes comes in the section on languages and letters:

The Sanscrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and in the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists: there is a similar reason, though not quite so forcible, for supposing that both the Gothic and the Celtic, though blended with a very different idiom, had the same origin with the Sanscrit; and the old Persian might be added to the same family, if this were the place for discussing any question concerning the antiquities of Persia.1

The passage immediately before it is rarely reprinted. In it Jones observes that perhaps five words in six of the spoken language of northern India derived from Sanskrit, yet he concludes that the grammar of “pure Hindi” was so different that Hindi must be an older native tongue onto which conquerors had grafted Sanskrit vocabulary.1 That is the reverse of the modern view, in which Hindi descends from the same Indo-Aryan line as Sanskrit. His contemporary Nathaniel Halhed, another British scholar in Bengal, had drawn the correct inference from the same facts in 1778.2

Jones had also been studying Sanskrit for only a short time. In September 1785 he wrote to Charles Chapman that he was “proceeding slowly, but surely” with it, and scholars have noted that the discourse came only about half a year into his study.32

What the discourse concluded

The discourse ends with a summary that is far less often quoted. Jones’s “result” was that the Hindus “had an immemorial affinity with the old Persians, Ethiopians, and Egyptians, the Phenicians, Greeks, and Tuscans, the Scythians or Goths, and Celts, the Chinese, Japanese, and Peruvians,” all of whom, he proposed, came from some central country.1 The languages of ancient Egypt, Phoenicia, China, Japan and Peru have nothing to do with the Indo-European family. They are on the list because Jones weighed myths, monuments and customs alongside grammar, and treated “affinity” in religion and in language as the same kind of evidence.2

Later discourses compounded the problem. In his sixth, on the Persians, Jones reported “perfect conviction, that the Pahlavi was a dialect of the Chaldaick,” that is, a Semitic language, when Pahlavi is an Iranian language and so Indo-European.12 Campbell lists further misclassifications from the later talks: Malay as of Arabian descent, Tibetan as originally Sanskrit, the Afghans as descendants of the Jews. By the Ninth Discourse of 1792 Jones was fitting the nations of Asia into the dispersal of Noah’s three sons, and in the Tenth he described his findings as confirming the Mosaic account of the early world.2

There is a further irony. The Third Discourse opens with a sharp warning that etymology “is a medium of proof so very fallacious, that, where it elucidates one fact, it obscures a thousand, and more frequently borders on the ridiculous, than leads to any solid conclusion.”1 Jones distrusted sound-alike word lists, and he required close knowledge of the languages compared. But as the linguist Bill Poser has pointed out, he never used the comparative method, the systematic matching of sound correspondences that defines modern historical linguistics, and he never published the details of his linguistic arguments at all.62

Others who saw the family first

The idea that Greek, Latin and the Germanic languages shared a lost ancestor was more than a century old by 1786. In 1647 the Leiden scholar Marcus Zuerius van Boxhorn, answering questions about the newly discovered goddess Nehalennia, argued on his title page that the common origin of the Greek, Roman and German languages from the Scythians could be clearly shown. He compared the languages to siblings who learn to speak from one mother, and he took pains to separate his view from the fanciful Dutch etymologies of Goropius Becanus. Boxhorn was no more reliable than Jones on the details: he counted the Persians and even the Turks among the Scythian peoples and leaned on loose word matches.7

Sanskrit, too, had entered European comparisons before Jones. Poser notes that the scholar Claudius Salmasius brought it in as early as 1643.6 Campbell lists sixteenth-century observers such as Thomas Stephens and Filippo Sassetti, and the Jesuit missionary Gaston-Laurent Coeurdoux.2 Coeurdoux (1691-1779), who spent four decades in the Madurai mission, sent a memoir to the Académie des Inscriptions in Paris in 1767 setting out the relationship between Sanskrit and European languages. It sat in manuscript until 1808, so its argument reached print more than twenty years after Jones’s discourse.8 Halhed’s Bengali grammar of 1778, which Jones knew, had already suggested that Sanskrit was related to Greek and Latin.2

None of this makes Jones a copyist. It means that his paragraph gathered up an idea that had been circulating, and gave it a memorable form from the most prestigious chair in Calcutta.

Learning in the service of rule

The colonial setting is not background to Jones’s scholarship. He described it himself. In the same September 1785 letter, he explained why he had taken up Sanskrit: “I can no longer bear to be at the mercy of our pundits, who deal out Hindu law as they please, and make it at reasonable rates, when they cannot find it ready made.”3 As Jones explained to the Governor-General, Parliament had directed the judges of his Supreme Court to decide disputes between Hindu and Muslim parties under their own laws of contract and inheritance, yet those laws were locked up in Sanskrit and Arabic, languages few Europeans would ever learn. In a letter of 19 March 1788 to Governor-General Cornwallis, Jones proposed a digest of Hindu and Muslim law, compiled by Indian scholars and translated by himself, so that the judges would no longer depend on the opinions of native lawyers. Cornwallis approved.3

The work that followed rested on Indian learning. The Sanskrit digest was compiled by the scholar Jagannatha and a team of pandits, whose preface Teignmouth printed; Jones died before he could translate it, and H. T. Colebrooke completed the English version.3 Jones’s own translation of the law book of Manu, published early in 1794,3 explained in its preface that British legislation had left Indians their own laws, which could not be applied until they were known. The preface ends by recalling “many millions of Hindu subjects, whose well directed industry would add largely to the wealth of Britain,” and who, Jones wrote, asked in return only protection, justice and “the benefit of those laws, which they have been taught to believe sacred.”9

The same preface praises the “spirit of sublime devotion” in Manu while calling it “a system of despotism and priestcraft,” and the Third Discourse admires ancient Indian learning while speaking of how “degenerate and abased so ever the Hindus may now appear.”91 Jones admired Sanskrit literature sincerely; his English version of Kalidasa’s Sakuntala (1789) introduced the play to European readers.3 That admiration coexisted with a belief in British rule and in what he called “the only true revelation,” and his own prefaces and letters present the knowledge he gathered as serving British courts and British interests in India.39 Poser, writing as a linguist, takes a gentler view: Jones was a political progressive, a friend of Benjamin Franklin and a supporter of the American Revolution, and “though an official of the British colonial government in India, he was not a colonialist.”6

Jones died in Calcutta on 27 April 1794, after a short illness that Teignmouth describes as an inflammation of the liver.3

What he got right, and what came after

Stripped of its setting, the famous paragraph holds up well. Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Germanic, Celtic and Old Persian do belong to one family. Jones pointed to verb roots and grammatical forms rather than loose word lists, which is the right kind of evidence. And he declined to make Sanskrit the parent language, as Halhed had suggested, preferring a “common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists.”12 That is close to the modern idea of an unattested ancestor, now called Proto-Indo-European.

What turned the insight into a discipline came after him. In 1816 Franz Bopp published a systematic comparison of the verb conjugations of Sanskrit with those of Greek, Latin, Persian and the Germanic languages.10 As Rosane Rocher put it, quoted by Campbell, Jones’s own summary “was a far cry from the method of linguistic reconstruction which Bopp and later scholars were to develop.”2

Jones deserves credit as a gifted translator of Persian, Arabic and Sanskrit and as the first president of the Asiatick Society. The single paragraph, though, is better read as a well-placed statement of an old idea, made inside a colonial court system and a biblical history of nations, than as the founding moment of a science.62

Footnotes

  1. Jones, Third and Sixth Anniversary Discourses, Works (1799), vol. 1. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6 ↩7 ↩8 ↩9

  2. Campbell 2006, pp. 245-261. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6 ↩7 ↩8 ↩9 ↩10 ↩11 ↩12 ↩13 ↩14

  3. Teignmouth, Memoirs (1805), on Jones’s birth, the 1783 appointment and voyage, letters of 1785 and 1788, the Digest, the Institutes, Sacontala and Jones’s death. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6 ↩7 ↩8 ↩9 ↩10 ↩11

  4. Jones, A Grammar of the Persian Language (1771), title page and preface. ↩

  5. Asiatick Researches, vol. 1 (Calcutta, 1788), Introduction. ↩

  6. Poser, Language Log, 2008. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

  7. Boxhorn, Antwoord (1647), title page and argument. ↩

  8. Karttunen, “Cœurdoux, Gaston-Laurent.” ↩

  9. Jones, Preface to Institutes of Hindu Law, Works (1799), vol. 3. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  10. Bopp, Conjugationssystem (1816), title page. ↩

Sources

  1. Jones, W. (1799). The Third Anniversary Discourse, delivered 2 February, 1786, on the Hindus; and The Sixth Anniversary Discourse, on the Persians. In The Works of Sir William Jones, in six volumes, vol. 1. London: G. G. and J. Robinson and R. H. Evans. archive.org/details/bim_eighteenth-century_the-works-of-sir-william_jones-sir-wi Used for: Date of the Third Discourse; its plan and opening praise of Bryant; the warning against etymology; the Hindi/Sanskrit paragraph; the philologer passage; 'how degenerate and abased so ever'; the concluding list of nations with an 'immemorial affinity'; the departing member who 'first opened' Sanskrit literature; the Sixth Discourse on Pahlavi as Chaldaic and on the first Persian language as mother of Sanskrit, Greek, Latin and Gothic.
  2. Asiatick Researches: or, Transactions of the Society Instituted in Bengal, for Inquiring into the History and Antiquities, the Arts, Sciences, and Literature, of Asia. Vol. 1. Calcutta: Printed and sold by Manuel Cantopher, at the Honourable the Company's Printing-Office, 1788. archive.org/details/in.gov.ignca.25079 Used for: Jones's first discourse, recalling that he was at sea the previous August on his voyage to India; founding of the Society at Calcutta in January 1784 on the model of European learned societies; the members' letter asking Warren Hastings and the Council to be patrons, and its signatories; Hastings declining the presidency; publication of the first volume by the Company's press, dated 1788; the 1788 printing of the Third Discourse (pp. 422-23), checked in OCR.
  3. Teignmouth, Lord [John Shore] (1805). Memoirs of the Life, Writings, and Correspondence of Sir William Jones. Philadelphia: Wm. Poyntell & Co. (first published London, 1804). archive.org/details/memoirsoflifewri00teig Used for: Birth in London (Teignmouth gives the year as 1745; the article follows Campbell's 1746); appointment as judge of the Supreme Court at Fort William and knighthood (March 1783); departure from England in April 1783 and arrival at Calcutta in September 1783; letter to Charles Chapman of September 28, 1785, on studying Sanskrit to avoid being 'at the mercy of our pundits'; letter to Cornwallis of March 19, 1788, proposing a digest of Hindu and Muslim law; Teignmouth's description of Charles Wilkins; the compilers' preface naming Jagannatha; Colebrooke's completion of the Digest translation; Sacontala; death on 27 April 1794.
  4. Jones, W. (1771). A Grammar of the Persian Language. London: W. and J. Richardson. archive.org/details/10522320bsb Used for: Publication in 1771 while Jones was a Fellow of University College, Oxford; the preface's account of why East India Company servants needed Persian, including the line about native interpreters; the promise that a student could answer 'any letter from an Indian prince' within a year.
  5. Jones, W. (1799). Preface to Institutes of Hindu Law: or, The Ordinances of Menu, according to the Gloss of Culluca. In The Works of Sir William Jones, in six volumes, vol. 3. London: G. G. and J. Robinson and R. H. Evans. (First published Calcutta, 1794.) archive.org/details/worksofsirwillia03jone Used for: Jones's stated reason for translating Manu (British legislation leaving Indians their own laws of contracts and inheritance); his mixed judgement of the text; the closing passage on 'many millions of Hindu subjects' whose industry 'would add largely to the wealth of Britain' and who asked for 'the benefit of those laws'; 'the only true revelation'.
  6. Campbell, L. (2006). Why Sir William Jones got it all wrong, or Jones' role in how to establish language families. Anuario del Seminario de Filología Vasca 'Julio de Urquijo' (ASJU), 40, 245-264. ojs.ehu.eus/index.php/ASJU/article/download/4384/4329 Used for: Jones's discourses as a single ethnological project; predecessors (Stephens, Sassetti, Coeurdoux, Halhed, Monboddo, Jäger and others); Jones's misclassifications (Hindi, Pahlavi, Egyptians, Chinese, Japanese, Peruvians, Malay, Tibetan); the biblical framework of the Ninth and Tenth Discourses; Halhed's contrasting conclusion; Jones's criteria and their limits; Jones began Sanskrit only months before the discourse; Rocher's comparison with Bopp's later method.
  7. Boxhorn, M. Z. van (1647). Antwoord van Marcus Zuerius van Boxhorn, gegeven op de vraaghen, hem voorgestelt over de bediedinge van de afgodinne Nehalennia ... in welcke de ghemeine herkomste van der Griecken, Romeinen, ende Duytschen tale uyt den Scythen duydelijck bewesen ... wordt. Leiden: Willem Christiaens vander Boxe. archive.org/details/boxhorn-1647 Used for: Title claim of a common Scythian origin of Greek, Latin and Germanic; the image of languages as siblings from one mother; his distancing from Goropius Becanus; his treatment of Persians (and Turks) as Scythian peoples and his loose word comparisons.
  8. Karttunen, K. 'Cœurdoux, Gaston-Laurent.' Persons of Indian Studies (Who Was Who in Indology). Online reference, last updated 2026. whowaswho-indology.info/1305/coeurdoux-gaston-laurent/ Used for: Coeurdoux's dates and Jesuit career in South India; his 1767 memoir to the Académie des Inscriptions on the relation of Sanskrit and European languages, unpublished until 1808 (MAIBL 49).
  9. Poser, W. (2008, August 15). Sir William Jones. Language Log, University of Pennsylvania. languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=489 Used for: Jones did not use the comparative method; the paragraph sits in a lecture series on human migrations; he did not publish the details of his linguistic arguments; Salmasius brought Sanskrit into the picture in 1643; Jones's real skill in Arabic, Persian and Turkish; Poser's view that Jones was a political progressive and 'not a colonialist'.
  10. Bopp, F. (1816). Über das Conjugationssystem der Sanskritsprache in Vergleichung mit jenem der griechischen, lateinischen, persischen und germanischen Sprache. Ed. K. J. Windischmann. Frankfurt am Main: Andreäische Buchhandlung. archive.org/details/11417954bsb Used for: Title, date and scope of Bopp's 1816 comparison of verb systems (title page and editor's preface read).

What the evidence does not settle

Points where sources disagree, or that we could not confirm. We list them rather than smooth them over.

  • Birth year: Teignmouth's Memoirs (Philadelphia 1805 printing, as OCR'd) give Jones's birth as the eve of Michaelmas 'in the year 1745'; Campbell (2006) and the standard dating give 1746. The article uses 1746 and does not give a day.
  • The Third Discourse was delivered on 2 February 1786 (date printed in Works, 1799, vol. 1) and first printed in Asiatick Researches vol. 1 (Calcutta, 1788). The quotation is taken from the 1799 Works text, which spells 'Gothic' and 'Celtic'. The 1788 Calcutta printing (Asiatick Researches vol. 1, pp. 422-23) was checked in a poor OCR and agrees in wording where legible. Campbell quotes the passage as 'Jones 1798' with the spelling 'Celtick' and slightly different punctuation. Long s has been modernized in all quotations.
  • The 'very ingenious member' leaving for Europe is not named in the discourse; Teignmouth identifies him as Charles Wilkins. The article body does not discuss him.
  • Coeurdoux's 1767 memoir was not printed until 1808 (Karttunen). Campbell, citing Cannon, says Jones had read Jesuit missionary reports including Coeurdoux's; how much of Coeurdoux's argument reached Jones before 1786 is not settled in the sources read here (Godfrey 1967, the specialist study, was not available). The article states only that Coeurdoux's work preceded Jones's and stayed unpublished.
  • Boxhorn's 1647 Antwoord was read in a Google Books scan with Dutch OCR on archive.org. The article paraphrases it and does not quote it.
  • Jones's methods and his Ninth and Tenth Discourses are described from Campbell (2006), who quotes them; those discourses were not read in a primary text here, and no wording from them is quoted.
  • Teignmouth's account of the 1788 letter to Cornwallis was read in a poor OCR; the article paraphrases the letter and quotes nothing from it.

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About this article: written for the new Wonders & Marvels by the Wonders & Marvels Research Desk, with AI-assisted research and drafting. It is an original work and does not reproduce any article previously published at this address.