Sir William Jones (28 September 1746 – 27 April 1794) was a British philologist, scholar and judge. Born in Westminster to the Welsh mathematician William Jones, he moved to the Bengal Presidency where Jones served as a puisne judge on the Supreme Court of Judicature at Fort William and also became a scholar of ancient Indian history. He is known for being one of the earliest scholars after father Gaston-Laurent Coeurdoux to assert the kinship of the Indo-European languages. Jones also founded the Asiatic Society in Calcutta in 1784.
Early life William Jones was born in London; his father William Jones (1675–1749) was a mathematician from Anglesey in Wales, noted for introducing the mathematical use of the symbol π. The young William Jones was a linguistic prodigy, who in addition to his native languages English and Welsh, learned Greek, Latin, Persian, Arabic, Hebrew and the basics of Chinese writing at an early age. By the end of his life, he knew eight languages with critical thoroughness. Jones's father died when he was aged three, and his mother Mary Nix Jones raised him. He was sent to Harrow School in September 1753 and then went on to University College, Oxford. He graduated there in 1768 and became M.A. in 1773. Financially constrained, he took a position tutoring the seven-year-old Lord Althorp, son of Earl Spencer. For the next six years, he worked as a tutor and translator. During this time he published in 1770 Histoire de Nader Chah (History of Nader Shah), a French translation of a work originally written in Persian by Mirza Mehdi Khan Astarabadi. This was done at the request of King Christian VII of Denmark: he had visited Jones, who by the age of 23 had already acquired a reputation as an orientalist, and in appreciation of his work he was granted membership in the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters. This would be the first of his numerous works on Persia, Anatolia, and the Middle East in general.
Legal studies and politics in England In 1770, Jones joined the Middle Temple and studied law for three years, a preliminary to his life-work in India. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society on 30 April 1772. In 1773, he was elected a member of The Club, of which he became president in 1780. He spent some time as a circuit judge in Wales, and then became involved in politics: he made a fruitless attempt to resolve the American Revolution in concert with Benjamin Franklin in Paris, and ran for the post of Member of Parliament from Oxford in the general election of 1780, but was unsuccessful. Jones was a radical political thinker, and a friend of American independence. His work, The principles of government; in a dialogue between a scholar and a peasant (1783), was the subject of a trial for seditious libel (known as the Case of the Dean of St Asaph) after it was reprinted by his brother-in-law William Davies Shipley.
Indian tenure He was appointed puisne judge to the Supreme Court of Judicature at Fort William in Calcutta, Bengal, on 4 March 1783, and on 20 March he was knighted. In April 1783 he married Anna Maria Shipley, the eldest daughter of Jonathan Shipley, Bishop of Llandaff and Bishop of St Asaph. Anna Maria used her artistic skills to help Jones document life in India. On 25 September 1783, he arrived in Calcutta. In the Subcontinent he was entranced by Indian culture, an as-yet untouched field in European scholarship, and on 15 January 1784 he founded the Asiatic Society in Calcutta. He studied the Vedas with Rāmalocana, a pandit teaching at the Hindu University of Nadiya, becoming a proficient Sanskritist. Jones kept up a ten-year correspondence on the topic of jyotisa or Hindu astronomy with fellow orientalist Samuel Davis. He learnt the ancient concept of Hindu Laws from Pandits. Over the next ten years, he produced a flood of works on India, launching the modern study of the subcontinent in virtually every social science. He also wrote on the Hindu and Muslim laws, music, literature, botany, and geography, and made the first English translations of several important works of Indian literature. Sir William Jones sometimes also went by the nom de plume Youns Uksfardi (Persian: یونس اوکسفردی, lit. 'Jones of Oxford'). This pen name can be seen on the inner front cover of his Persian Grammar published in 1771 (and in subsequent editions). Jones's works, especially his translations, with their philological and anthropological appeal, became a major inspiration of a certain orientalist strain discernible in Romantic poetries such as Coleridge's "Kubla Khan" or Fitzgerald's "Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam". He died in Calcutta on 27 April 1794 at the age of 47 and is buried in South Park Street Cemetery.
Scholarly contributions Jones is known today for his propositions about relationships between the Indo-European languages. In his Third Anniversary Discourse to the Asiatic Society (1786) he suggested that Sanskrit, Greek and Latin languages had a common root, and that indeed they might all be further related, in turn, to Gothic and the Celtic languages, as well as to Persian. Although his name is closely associated with this observation, he was not the first to make it. In the 16th century, European visitors to India became aware of similarities between Indian and European languages and as early as 1653, the Dutch scholar Marcus Zuerius van Boxhorn had published a proposal for a proto-language ("Scythian") for Germanic, Romance, Greek, Baltic, Slavic, Celtic and Iranian. Finally, in a memoir sent to the French Academy of Sciences in 1767 Gaston-Laurent Coeurdoux, a French Jesuit who spent all his life in India, had specifically demonstrated the existing analogy between Sanskrit and European languages. In 1786 Jones postulated a proto-language uniting Sanskrit, Iranian, Greek, Latin, Germanic and Celtic, but in many ways, his work was less accurate than his predecessors, as he erroneously included Egyptian, Japanese and Chinese in the Indo-European languages, while omitting Hindustani and Slavic. Jones also suggested that Sanskrit "was introduced [to north India] by conquerors from other kingdoms in some very remote age" displacing "the pure Hindi" of north India. Nevertheless, Jones's third annual discourse before the Asiatic Society on the history and culture of the Hindus (delivered on 2 February 1786 and published in 1788) with the famed "philologer" passage is often cited as the beginning of comparative linguistics and Indo-European studies.
… excerpt ends here. Continue reading the full article.
