Sir William Jones

Clay County Histories

Markus Krueger | Program Director HCSCC

markus.krueger@hcsmuseum.org

In 1786, an Englishman working in India named Sir William Jones gave a speech to the Asiatic Society explaining something really interesting he stumbled upon. His job had him working with old local laws that were originally written in Sanskrit. Sanskrit is the ancestral language that eventually turned into the Hindi and Urdu languages spoken throughout what is now India and Pakistan, rather like how French and Spanish evolved from the Latin of the Roman Empire. Sir William had a knack for languages, so he decided to learn Sanskrit in order to read the ancient texts himself.

Sanskrit, he told the crowd, was surprisingly similar to Latin and ancient Greek. And once he started thinking about it, he noticed that Sanskrit/Hindi/Urdu had many similarities with Persian, English, and Welsh Gaelic. All these languages must be related! They must ultimately spring from one common root language, just as cousins trace their ancestry to common grandparents.

Centuries of linguist scholars built upon this foundation. They called this group of related languages the Indo-European family, and they called the theoretical original root language Proto-Indo-European.

Linguists found that languages tend to change according to predictable rules, or at least rules of thumb. You know this, too, even if you don’t think about it. I grew up in Minnesota, and my friend and coworker James Christie grew up in England. We have different accents. I say lakes are made of “wadder,” James pronounces it “wotah,” and neither of us pronounce it the way people decided it should be spelled four hundred years ago: “water.” We often bump into each other at the same bar, but he pronounces it “bah.” At work, what he calls a “lift,” I call an “elavader.”

A linguist would notice the following: the people who taught James and me to speak were of related cultures that had been separated from each other for a long time, probably before elevators were invented since we have different words for them. Where I learned to speak, Ts in the middle of words turn into Ds, so I could be expected to call a “platter” a “pladder” (which I do). Where James grew up, Rs in the middle and end of words are pronounced “ah.” I remember hearing British journalists announce that “Kia Stahmah” was their new prime minister. I had never heard of him before, but my knowledge of the English accent made me wonder if this guy’s actual name was something like “Kier Starmer,” and by golly, I was right. Accents follow patterns, and accents eventually get so different, and enough unique new words get added, that they are recognized as separate languages.

Using tricks like these, linguists have studied all the related languages in the Indo-European family, including about 450 we speak today and dead languages we know from ancient writing. Linguists share their knowledge and hunches with their ancient historian and archeologist friends, who study the past with different methods. Putting everybody’s heads together, we can know a lot about the people who spoke the language we call Proto-Indo-European.

Following hundreds of language change patterns backwards in time, linguists have reconstructed a dictionary full of original words that no one ever wrote down and no one has spoken in four thousand years (they pronounced “water” something like “wodr”). If certain words like “ox” sound similar across the languages, it leads us to believe our common ancestors raised oxen. Using that logic, speakers of Proto-Indo-European were grain farmers and animal herders who wore wool clothes, kept sheep, rode horses, made wheeled carts and pottery, and worshipped gods who live in the sky. Using their vocabulary words as clues, we figure they were probably the people archeologists call the “Yamnaya culture,” who lived in Ukraine starting around 3300 BC. From there, they spread around the world in immigration waves. Today, over 3 billion people, including you, speak versions of their language in our own widely varied accents.