William Jones

William Jones was a British philologist and judge who served on the Supreme Court of Bengal from 1783. His study of Sanskrit alongside his existing knowledge of Greek and Latin led him to argue, in a 1786 address to the Asiatic Society of Bengal, that the three languages shared a common ancestor no longer extant, along with Gothic, Celtic and Old Persian. The claim is conventionally treated as the founding statement of comparative philology and, in time, of the Indo-European family as a scholarly object, even though Jones did not himself use the term Indo-European, and it was later scholars, working out the sound correspondences in detail over the following century, who turned his observation into a demonstrated method.