The discovery of Indo-European

A. In 1786, William Jones, a British jurist and Orientalist, presented an address to the Bengal Asiatic Society in which he observed:

The Sanskrit 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.

Jones was making the first official observation of the fact that groups of languages develop from single ones; that is, he inaugurated the study of the natural history of language.

B. The kind of “affinity” he referred to involved not only word roots in common among Sanskrit, Latin, and Greek but also aspects of grammar. For example, even the case endings on nouns in these languages are clearly related:

tooth in four cases in the languages William Jones referred to:

C. Jones was referring to ancient languages no longer spoken. But Sanskrit is the ancestor of languages now spoken in India, such as Hindi and Bengali; Latin was the ancestor of the Romance languages; and Ancient Greek has developed into Modern Greek. Linguists later found that the “affinity” Jones referred to applies not only to these languages but to most of the languages of Europe, as well as Iran and India. The “common source” Jones referred to indeed no longer exists, but its descendants are now known as the Indo-European language family.

D. Here is the word for tooth in an assortment of these languages: