Sir William "Oriental" Jones: Ahead of His Time, and Ours
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A dominant school of modern historiography has it that studying the lives of outstanding individuals is pointless. No single person, it insists, can wield enough influence to change history. As hip these sceptics are, a few historical figures make monkeys out of them with embarrassing ease. Sir William "Oriental" Jones is a case in point.
Sir William remains a towering figure, having earned distinction in his brief lifetime as a Sanskritist, poet, political activist, legal scholar, historian, botanist, religious scholar, archaeologist, astronomer, and anthropologist before the fact; today he is considered the founder of comparative and historical linguistics, as well as Indology and the comparative study of literature, philology, and mythology. He is indeed one of the most influential individuals in history.
Father of modern linguistics
Born in London in 1746, young William capitalised on the advantages that his well-to-do, well-educated family could provide. He studied law at Oxford and was later awarded a judgeship in Bengal. As respectable as his career was in Britain, it was India that gave Sir William his place in history. At a time when Western consensus held Muslim and Hindu civilisation in contempt (if this period can be said to have passed), this enthusiastic, multilingual amateur threw himself into the study of ancient India, including mastery of Sanskrit. After analysing its vocabulary, Jones famously concluded that Sanskrit shared ancestry with Greek and Latin. Further extrapolation brought "Celtick" and "Gothick" into the family. Jones named his hypothetical ancestral language "Aryan," after an early Indian people.
Sir William was correct, of course. The Aryan tag was so abused by the Nazis that we usually call his ancestral tongue Proto-Indo-European today, but it's the same language. With this discovery, Sir William singlehandedly created modern linguistics; his fundamental concept, that a few ancient umbrella traditions gave rise to the full spectrum of modern languages, finds its extreme expression in monogenetics. Along the way he founded an intellectual movement called "orientalism" (hence his nickname), which would later spawn Indology, and fired the imagination of scholar and layman alike. All of the great "foreign experts" of Western literature, from Bram Stoker's Dr. Van Helsing to Hollywood's Indiana Jones (resemblance intentional), trace their lineage to Sir William.
Along the way, Jones invented the practice of mining linguistics to fill gaps in historical chronology, an approach considered "obvious" today. For example, he traced the migration of chess through Arabic and Persian to Sanskrit and ancient India.
