Language in ancient Europe: An introduction

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 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: there is a similar reason, though not quite so forcible, for supposing that both the Gothik and the Celtick, though blended with a very different idiom, had the same origin with the Sanscrit; and the old Persian might be added to the same family. Asiatick Researches 1:442–443 In recent years, these words of an English jurist, Sir William Jones, have been frequently quoted (at times in truncated form) in works dealing with Indo-European linguistic origins. And appropriately so. They are words of historic proportion, spoken in Calcutta, 2 February 1786, at a meeting of the Asiatick Society, an organization that Jones had founded soon after his arrival in India in 1783 (on Jones, see, inter alia, Edgerton 1967).