William Jones (philologist)
Sir William Jones ( born September 28, 1746 London, † April 27, 1794 in Calcutta) was a British Indologist and lawyer. He was since 1783, Superior Court Judge in Calcutta. He is particularly known for his work on Indo-European language family.
Life and work
When the Brahmins, he learned Sanskrit and recognized as one of the first whose genetic relationship with the Greek, Latin, Gothic and Celtic. He thus became an important pioneer in the new discipline of Indo-European linguistics, which is usually called in German-speaking Indo-European studies.
William Jones was born in 1746 in London. His father was the mathematician William Jones. The young William Jones proved to be a gift for languages and learned early Greek, Latin, Persian and Arabic. It is reported that he had mastered 28 languages in total in his life. Despite the early death of his father, the son could attend university and pursue a career as a translator. He published Histoire de Nader Chah, a translation of written Persian original.
Since 1770, he studied law. This professional direction led him ultimately to India, where he was appointed in 1783 to the Supreme Court in Bengal ( Calcutta).
Fascinated by the Indian culture founded Jones in 1784 for the purpose of exploring the Bengali peoples the Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal, one of the first companies of its kind In addition, he devoted himself primarily to the legal system as well as music, literature, botany and geography and was an important translator Indian literature. This won their importance in the West, especially the fact that Jones and she translated it as mediated to a wider British public. So she was indirectly accessible to an increasingly larger English - educated Indian elite, a cultural self-confidence "India " developed on this basis as an ancient civilization, an idea that had arisen in their approaches again in Europe, including in German Romanticism. In this context also falls the first English translation of the Bhagavad Gita by Charles Wilkins in 1785, emanated from that in India itself in consequence an extraordinary history of ideas.
William Jones is known as one of the first to have recognized the similarity of Sanskrit with Greek and Latin (formerly known as Jones realized this already, several European researchers: Filippo Sassetti in the 16th century, Benjamin Schulze in 1725 and Gaston -Laurent Cœurdoux in 1767 ). In The Sanscrit Language ( 1786), Jones suggested that all three languages had a common origin and that they were also related to the Gothic and the Celtic languages and Persian. This was one of the early indications of the existence of the Indo-European language family and is an early example of the use of comparative linguistics.