A History of Agriculture in India v1.c24.4

v1.c24.4

The earliest evidence about the Aryans and their language is from philology. During the period from A.D. 1767 to A.D. 1786, two European scholars, Coeurdox, a French missionary, and Sir William Jones, the founder of the Royal Asiatic Society of Calcutta, made an outstanding linguistic discovery. According to them, the Sanskrit of the Rig-Veda had remarkable affinities with Latin and Greek in vocabulary and grammar. Such striking similarities could be accounted for only by supposing that these languages had a common origin in some extinct language. This supposition was supported by the work of Bopp, a grammarian. By 1813, someone had suggested the word ‘Indo-European’ as a convenient term for the group of allied languages and their presumed original.