A Brill Calendar: September 28

Few people have loved and cherished language with so much insight and passion as William Jones the Welshman (London 28 September 1746 – Calcutta, India, 27 April 1794).

He would already be important in his own right as a valued member of Doctor Johnson’s legendary club; but as an Orientalist, William Jones remains peerless. At the end of his none too long life he had learned, under his own guidance, more than two dozen languages including Chinese. The lack of funds needed to survive independently and autonomously as a linguist coaxed him to earn his living as a barrister as from 1774; three years later his ‘ Grammar of the Persian Language’ had become the authoritative text on the subject.

Persian and Middle Eastern culture and civilization being highly fashionable in Europe during the waning of the Enlightenment, Jones’ s wealth of editions and translations brought him in 1783 a knighthood and a seat as a judge of the Supreme Court of Calcutta. It is seldom that a colonial government official has formulated a more perspicacious address than the one of William Jones before the Asiatic Society of Bengal in 1786. He postulated then, as the first scholar to do so, the common roots of Greek and Sanskrit; it was and is a flash of insight second to none; also outside the field of linguistics proper.

It might well be argued that comparative linguistics start with this young man, listening breathlessly to the great Doctor Samuel Johnson fascinating all and sundry with his wit and eloquence. The early modern (cultural) acculturation of the world’s largest continent is to be credited to one individual ‘ aficionado’, not to an international taskforce.