This presentation gave birth to a whole new field of scholarship. Once he’d noticed these similarities, Jones began comparing other languages to Sanskrit, and he found more and more evidence for a budding theory: that a wide variety of classical languages – Persian, Latin, Celtic, Sanskrit, Greek – had their roots in a parent language.Įventually, Jones presented his theory in Calcutta. In Latin, for example, “king” is “rex,” and in Sanskrit it’s “raja.” And Sanskrit for the English word “birch” is “bhurja.” Though the priests were ignorant of the words’ meanings, they managed to pass them down from one generation to the next.Īs Jones studied these texts, he began to recognize unmistakable similarities between Sanskrit and the European languages. The language had already been dead for hundreds of years, yet it managed to survive thanks to the priests who’d memorized certain hymns, called the Vedas. Sir William Jones was working in India when he took up the unusual hobby of learning Sanskrit.

Why are these words so similar? An eighteenth-century English judge wondered the same thing – and his attempt to answer that question essentially launched the field of historical linguistics. Take the word “brother.” In German it’s “bruder,” in Sanskrit it’s “bhrata,” and in Persian it’s “biradar.” One age-old indicator of a near-global connection is language.

This may well be the case, but that doesn’t mean that connectedness is anything new. Many people will tell you that today’s world is more connected than ever before.

The Mother Tongue by Bill Bryson