Sir William Jones

William Jones was born on 28 September 1746 in London and died on 27 April 1794 in Calcutta. A jurist fluent in dozens of languages, he was knighted in 1783 and sailed to India as a judge of the Supreme Court of Bengal, where he founded the Asiatic Society of Bengal in 1784. In a discourse delivered to the society on 2 February 1786, he observed that Sanskrit bore too close a resemblance to Greek and Latin, in both verb roots and grammatical forms, to be the product of chance, and proposed that all three had sprung from a common source that no longer existed. The observation is usually credited as the founding insight of comparative and historical linguistics, though the systematic comparative method for reconstructing that common ancestor was worked out afterward by Rasmus Rask, Jacob Grimm and Franz Bopp.