Prehistoric India to 1000 B.C. c14.3

c14.3

TOWARDS the end of the eighteenth century two Europeans resident in India, a French missionary and an English administrator, made (apparently independently) an outstanding linguistic discovery. Cœurdoux in 1767 and Sir William Jones in 1786 published the conclusions they had been led to by a study of Sanskrit, the ancient Indian liturgical language (represented for instance in the *Rigveda*), which they both perceived to have the most remarkable affinities with the Latin and Greek tongues in vocabulary and grammar. It seemed to them that such striking similarities could be accounted for only by supposing that these languages had a common origin in some extinct tongue and that there had been a dispersal of peoples to east and west. This supposition was put on a sound footing by the later work of such grammarians as Bopp, and by 1813 someone had suggested the word ‘Indo-European’ as a convenient term for the group of allied languages and their presumed original. The name has been retained in modern studies, which have thrown much new light on the problems involved, and vindicated the ideas of Cœurdoux and Jones.