William Jones (philologist)

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 have proficiency in up to twenty-eight languages, making him a hyperpolyglot.

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 French translation of a work originally written in Persian 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. This would be the first of numerous works on Persia, Turkey, and the Middle East in general.

For three years begining 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.

In the Subcontinent he was entranced by Indian culture, an as-yet untouched field in European scholarship, and 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.

Contributions

His third discourse published in 1798 with the famed "philologer" passage is often cited as the beginning of comparative linguistics and Indo-European studies. This is Jones' most famous quote, establishing his tremendous find in the history of linguistics:

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 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 spring from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists . . . .

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.
• The 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica, 11th ed. http://16.1911encyclopedia.org/J/JO/JONES_SIR_WILLIAM.htm