Who Was the First To Study the History of Languages?

Why are people interested in language history?

People have always been interested in language. Many are eager to learn more about the words that they use on a daily basis that feel so familiar. Where did they come from? Why are they spelt in the way in which they are? Why do we pronounce them in the way that we do? How was all this vocabulary established? The interest is understandable.

Reading, writing and speaking are activities that most of us engage in all day, every day. The language that we use to do this, and the words that we deploy, reflect who we are as a person. Language forms part of our identity. It is an expression of our cultural foundations and heritage. The story of language, therefore, is an exciting and captivating one.

Knowing the background to our words and expressions helps us discover how to relate to others around the world – and how we shape our own views and perspectives. The history of languages is a story that is fraught with controversy and speculation, sometimes arrogance and ignorance. The study of language history is full of intriguing characters, all of whom became driven by their desire to unlock the deepest secrets of each language and its evolution.    

How are language and culture connected?

There are numerous examples of literary figures in popular culture who have had fun with this aspect of languages. Some have woven it beautifully into their own creations. One of the most popular novels ever written isThe Lord of the Rings, which by 2011 had sold over 150 million copies worldwide. Its author, J.R.R. Tolkien, had an immense fascination for foreign languages. This becomes unmissable as you read the six books of the trilogy. Indeed, his first job, after the end of the First World War, was to research the history of words on behalf of the Oxford English dictionary. While this might seem a rather dry occupation for some, for Tolkien it was far from it.

Throughout The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, we find societies – and creatures – who all speak languages designed to reflect their ‘stock’ and who they are as a people. Take the Ents, for example, the living talking trees. Admittedly, timescales for trees are rather different than those for other living creatures, such as hobbits and Men. Tolkien ensures therefore that their language mirrors this. As one of the tree folk remarks, Ents do not say anything in ‘Entish,’ unless “it is worth taking a long time to say, and to listen to.”¹

During his academic endeavours, Tolkien became engrossed in all forms of real-life languages such as Old English, Norse and other German-based languages. He also studied more obscure languages such Welsh and Finnish, the latter of which provides the basis of some of the elfish tongues which feature heavily during the screenplay.

It is highly entertaining, of course, within the context of The Lord of the Rings, but it also reminds us how language links people to their cultures, exactly as it is in the real world. It’s one reason why learning and understanding languages is so appealing. The words we use every day reveal a huge amount about our cultural background, and their origins paint fascinating stories. Stories of cultural interactions and exchanges that have taken place all over the world, throughout the ages.

What does religion say about how languages came about?

Although modern day linguistics has taken on an increasingly scientific approach, the origins of language study, or more specifically the relationship of languages to each other, had its earliest roots in religious studies. The biblical story of the city of Babel (‘Babel’ meaning ‘Gate of God’) captured the attention of religious scholars. One particular utterance from the Lord carries immense cultural significance. Upon seeing humanity trying to build a tower to reach the heavens, he proclaims: “Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.”²

Swiss professor of theology, Theodore Bibliander, (1504-1564) describes the aftermath of this event in some detail. As we learn, the workman asking for the trowel, for example, would be handed a straightedge or plumb line instead. When instructions to lower rope are given, the rope is raised instead, and so it continues. We have, then, a building site that is in utter chaos.

However, despite the chaos, Bibliander explains that those destined to live together would at least speak similar languages. The similarities, he continues, would follow the pattern of how God allotted different regions of the world to the sons of Noah’s sons. In this account, God gives the European region to the sons of Japheth, Africa to the sons of Ham and Asia to the sons of Shem.

This provides a neat and religiously acceptable explanation for both language similarities on the one hand, and diversity in the regions of Europe, Africa and Asia on the other. However, this did not answer the critical question of which one was the original. That said, it did serve as enough of an answer for an incredibly long time. The religious backdrop of Mediaeval Europe was one of the reasons why progress in the study of language history was initially so painstakingly slow.

What was the role of early dictionaries?

Even earlier than Bibliander, the great Italian poet, Dante (1265-1321), had pointed to connections within Romance languages, the group which includes Latin-based languages such as Italian, French and Spanish.³ Some linguists believe that one of the terms he used, ‘idioma tripharium,’ was, in fact, a very early reference to the idea of an original language, although others dismiss this as dubious.

Scholars had been compiling dictionaries, or ‘word books’ from an early age. They would have undoubtedly observed many language similarities and patterns due to works such as Sigismundus Gelenius’ Lexicon symphonum of 1537. This is one of the earliest known publications to include Germanic, Slavic, Greek and Latin words listed together alongside each other.

There were, however, greater changes taking place. Europeans were stepping up their exploration of the oceans. Globalization – and with it the exchange of religious, philosophical and cultural ideas – was a rapidly increasing phenomenon. One documented journey is that of Italian merchant Filippo Sassetti, whose business took him on a trip to Goa for five years, from about 1583 onwards.

How did trade and travel accelerate learning in the field?

Although primarily a merchant, Sassetti was a jack-of-many-trades. He had interests in numerous fields. These included botany, geography, astronomy and of course languages, among many others. It was during this expedition to India that he wrote in a private letter how he was struck by the similarities between the Indian Sanskrit language of Goa and Latin of home.⁴

In the letter, he carefully explains how the word for God is deva in Sanskrit and dio in Italian. Meanwhile, the word for snake is sarpa in Sanskrit and serpe in Italian. And the numbers seven, eight and nine were are also strikingly similar. These are sapta and sette, ashta and otto; and nava and nove respectively.

How could it be, then, that a language in such a ‘far flung’ corner of the world could have so many similarities with languages back in Europe? Sassetti’s trip was an indication of how globalization was set to change the way in which we perceived the world forever. More specifically, in linguistics, it paved the way for more detailed analysis of language relationships and, with that, language history.

What was Scythian?

It was not only India that captured early linguists’ imaginations. Leiden, in South Holland and site of the oldest university in the Netherlands, was home to another hub of research. Leiden professor, Frans van Ravelingen (or Franciscus Raphelengius, 1539-1597), had knowledge of Arabic and Persian. While translating the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Torah), he noticed similarities between the Germanic Dutch language and Persian.

Studies of the two languages side-by-side continued as more and more texts were brought back from Persia. Although not published as a formal theory at the time, evidence was pointing ever more towards a common ‘source’ language for many languages across Europe and India. With all the activity in Leiden, it is perhaps not surprising that one of the first published theories about an original ‘source’ language came from here.

Dutch scholar Marcus Zuerius van Boxhorn (1602-1653) taught at the University from 1632 onwards. The reason for his hypothesis was both dramatic and charming. At the end of 1646, storms and gales swept away large parts of sand dunes at a village called Domburg, in the Dutch province of Zeeland. The storm uncovered the remains of a Roman temple, that the Romans had devoted to a fertility goddess named Nehalennia. Remains at the site included altar stones, tablets and inscriptions. Van Boxhorn set about explaining the origin of the name of the goddess.

He decreed that it came from ‘Scythian.’ He said this was the basis of both modern and classical languages known at the time. Scythian was the common ancestral language.⁵ The ‘Scythian’ hypothesis was to become an extremely well-known theory until at least the mid-1700s. It was frequently used to account for any similarities found in languages, from Indian Sanskrit through to Greek, Persian, Latin and Germanic languages including Dutch. 

If there were an ancestral tongue for all these languages, there was now the exciting prospect that it would be possible to piece together the history of languages and their relationships to each other. The method would be to simply compare one language to another. If one were willing to put in enough work and effort, there was even the possibility that one could answer the question of the homeland of the original language.

One might expect a rush to try and piece this puzzle together in order to answer one of the biggest cultural questions of all time. The rush, however, did not come, at least not immediately. For most of the 1700s, discoveries and comparisons were made in the same haphazard and disjointed way. This was in spite of the numerous publications that pursued the Scythian hypothesis. There remained no formal approach to language history studies. It had not captured enough people’s imaginations to want to establish one.

When did comparative linguistics start?

Nevertheless, this was set to change. As the 1700s rumbled on, so too did the process of globalization. With that, ongoing exploration of the oceans resulted in Great Britain trying to establish colonies in as many parts of the world that it possibly could. British rule in India came about off the back of the British East Indies Company. A British presence had become increasingly established in the sub-continent of India throughout the second half of the 1700s.

Then, in the late 1700s, a name emerges that was to become infamous in the world of language study: Sir William Jones. In 1786, Sir Jones moved to India, after being appointed as a judge of the Bengal Supreme Court.⁶ One of the more positive outcomes of the British empire was tighter interaction with cultures that otherwise would have been far more difficult to study. It also meant close European contact with the hugely significant Sanskrit language. Sanskrit was a fine, ancient language of priests and learned men of India.

Sir Jones was already under pressure before his arrival in India. He had fostered a highly regarded reputation in the community of linguists to the extent that, “intellectuals were literally expecting major discoveries in colonial India.”⁷  

Furthermore, his background was, by all accounts, formidable. One biographer describes Sir Jones’ father as an entrepreneur and pioneer of contemporary British science. His mother, meanwhile, Elizabeth Rowland, was, “related to the antiquarian Lewis Morris in a line back to Hwfa ap Cynddelw, one of the fifteen tribes of North Wales.”⁸  So, would the young Sir Jones also one day be able to lay claim to the revered title of pioneer? It would all come down to events in Bengal.

Who was Sir William Jones?

Sir Jones was by all accounts a natural linguist. He learned Latin and Greek at the school of Harrow, before moving on to the study of Persian which he took up at Oxford. Before moving to India, he had already published the highly acclaimed Grammar of the Persian Language in 1771. At the same time, he developed a career as a successful barrister. Sir Jones had been waiting for the posting to India since 1778. He had had to wait a further five years before achieving the aim, having been knighted shortly before leaving.⁹

While in Bengal, Sir Jones established the Asiatic Society on 15 January 1784. He had a vision. He wanted to create a centre for Asian or ‘Orientalist’ studies, as it was termed at the time. It was to be an establishment that would decipher the meanings behind the art and culture of the East, especially that of Hindu background. Today, the Society curates a museum. It undertakes research activities in both humanities and science, as well as being an advisory body to the government of India.

It was during the Society’s third conference in 1786 that Sir Jones delivered the words, published later, that were destined to capture the imaginations of language historians (or ‘philologers’) across Europe for ever after. His words ignited a passion that drove academic pursuit to unprecedented levels. He proclaimed:

“The Sanscrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity than could possibly have been produced by accident. So strong indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists.” ⁷

Despite all the earlier work compiled by other linguists, it was this proclamation that led to his being crowned the ‘father of modern linguistics.’¹⁰ Sir Jones benefited from two complementary circumstances. On the one hand, academics were already hanging on his every word, eagerly awaiting news of his observations in India. Meanwhile, Romanticism was gathering momentum in Europe. With that came a growing desire to trace ones roots. Romanticists wanted to understand ones place in the world by re-establishing links to the past.

For the first time, academics started to consider language study in a whole new light. Up until this time, it had largely only been the domain of religious scholars. Only religious scholars had hitherto needed to know about technical or structural aspects of language. Consequently, effort had been focused on describing the construction of a single language, mainly in isolation from other languages. Where languages had been considered side-by-side, the motivation was often religious or confined to small groups of academics.

What is comparative linguistics?

However, Sir Jones had the reputation, and now the first-hand knowledge, that was needed to convince academics back in Europe that there was indeed a whole new ‘science’ to be learned. This was the birth of the ‘science’ of language. It was to be a discipline akin to biology. Academics could establish linguistic relationships by comparing one language to another in a highly methodical, observational manner.

This ‘science’ became known as comparative linguistics. It involved comparing words (vocabulary), sounds (phonology) and structures (grammar) across languages. It set the scene for identifying language families around the world. There was now the enthralling possibility of tracing these relationships back through history and even drawing up a family tree. As a new science, it meant that discoveries were almost inevitable. This made it an extremely attractive proposition to anyone with an interest.

This new science appealed to the Romantics of Europe. They had been, up until this point, busy rejecting the ordered world of the Classicists that had gone before them. This was especially true in Germany. The timing of Sir Jones’ announcement was therefore perfect. German Romanticism had had a delayed start within the decentralized lands of 18th century Germany. However, it really began to gather momentum during the late 1790s. German Romantics came from a broad range of fields, although artists and philosophers, in particular, were abundant among them. With such wide appeal, it had a profound impact on German culture.

German Romanticism had been characterized by a desire to appreciate the imagination, the subconscious, the irrational and oftentimes the exotic. There was a nostalgic look to the past, in particular the Middle Ages. This was hailed as a time when people were more connected to their roots, and to nature. There was a desire to reach a sense of perfection, which, many believed, would come through the liberation of the imagination. This was balanced with a wish to reinstate a supposed ‘lost sense’ of community spirit.

However, Romantics were increasingly seeking progression through the understanding of history. They fostered an appreciation of all aspects of art, especially folklore and mythology. Romantic movements almost everywhere in Europe shared two common characteristics. First the urge to ‘seek strange truth in undiscovered lands.’ Second, the belief that current society was broken but that regeneration was possible through the combination of art and an understanding of history.¹¹

Comparative linguistics and the Schlegel brothers

In a decentralized Germany, there was also the additional desire to promote ‘togetherness,’ something that, whether consciously or coincidentally, resulted in a frenzy of collaborative efforts in terms of language studies.¹¹ This included collaboration between pairs of brothers, such as Friedrich and August Schlegel, and most famously, of course, between the brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm. Brothers Grimm are famous, of course, for collecting and publishing stories from oral tradition. Their work ensured the survival of tales like Cinderella, Rumpelstiltskin and Snow White. 

While the fascination for folklore grew out of the desire to understand roots, the quest for the exotic was fuelling another fascination. This resulted in the inescapable lure of the Orient. Its philosophy, its religion, its science and its body of literature were all highly revered and meticulously studied. Its greatest proponent was undoubtedly Friedrich von Schlegel. Schlegel had moved to Paris in 1802 to study Oriental literature and culture, and to learn Sanskrit.

This led to the 1808 publication ‘On the language and wisdom of the Indians.’ Such was Schlegel’s high regard for Indian philosophy and his contempt of 1800s European culture, that notoriously he describes Paris as a place where he can find no fantasy, no art, no love, no religion. ¹² In his work, Schlegel lovingly and painstakingly reviews Sanskrit words and grammatical structures. His aim was to prove the language’s place at the top of the family tree and show how other languages are an unsatisfactory abstraction of it.

In fact, it was quite possible that his affection for the language and its teachings frequently led him to erroneous conclusions. Some of these were at odds with even Sir Jones himself and others before him, who had placed Sanskrit alongside Greek, Latin and others, rather than as the original linguistic source.

Why is Sanskrit so important?

It is easy to see how Schlegel could become so carried away with Sanskrit. Undeniably a highly philosophical, scientific and religious language, it is wealthy in words that explain states of consciousness, of particular appeal to the Romantic mind of the early 1800s. Its vocabulary can be so precise that it gives us words such as ‘karma,’ for which English has no suitable equivalent. It was not just the vocabulary but the ‘complete universe’ that it represents that captured the mind of Schlegel.

Schlegel says that Oriental philosophy is so stimulating and complete that, without it, “European genius would never have soared so high.” He points out that the inspiration for Pythagoras’ theorem was likely inspired by the mathematics of the East. He also attests that science is “united into one indivisible body.” He adds, “Nothing that exists can actually be called new. All must be kindled and inspired by ancient memories, instructed by departed genius, and formed and developed by antique power and energy.”

Comparative Linguistics and Science

Even today, fellow scientists encourage others to consider Sanskrit scripts, such as the Vedas, for inspiration. Consider this observation from a scientific publication of our time: “According to the Vedas, our universe (which is one of an infinite number of material universes within the vaster expanse of the spiritual worlds) is encapsulated by concentric regions made up of successive material elements that isolate us from the other universes.”

In the world of modern physics, the article points out: “This concept of multiple universes and possible tests to infer their existence have been studied and classified by several physicists like Max Tegmark and Brian Greene.” ¹³ Here, the ancient Vedic scripts have provided a significant explanation of the origins of the universe, a point upon which religion and science so often disagree.

Could, then, the Sanskrit Vedas offer a unique chance to bridge the gap between religion and science? As physicist and Hindu monk Mauricio Garrido explains: “The Vedic cosmology of ancient India is incredibly rich and has many points of tangency with modern cosmology, which may help in the construction of that common ground between science and religion.” ¹³

Mark Twain sums it up in his 1897 book, Following the Equator. He decrees: “This is India … cradle of the human race, birthplace of human speech, mother of history, grandmother of legend, great-grandmother of tradition, whose yesterdays bear date with the moldering antiquities of the rest of the nations… India had the start of the whole world at the beginning of things. She had the first civilization; she had the first accumulation of material wealth; she was populous with deep thinkers and the subtle intellects; she had mines, and woods, and a fruitful soil.”

Nevertheless, in Schlegel’s time, these statements did not sit well in Europe, whose academics were largely unable to entertain the idea that Europe was an immature civilization in comparison to that of the Indian sub-continent. They were so completely unable to accept it, that it was certainly not going to be the home of the original language, in their opinion.

The Birth of Indo-European Studies

For such a young discipline, academics had already drawn the battlelines. This was to set the scene for intense debate for the next generation of language historians to follow.

Much depended on whether the academics were considering the world order through the lens of an anthropologist, an archaeologist, a geneticist, historian or linguist. Ideally, the stories from each discipline should tally up. Often, they did not. Thus, the quest to find the original source of Sanskrit, Latin, Greek and all the other related languages gathered momentum.

It was against this backdrop that studies into what became known as the Indo-European branch of languages really began.

1. JRR Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, Glasgow 1991, p. 80.
2. Genesis 11:7
3. Classifications | The Oxford Guide to the Romance Languages | Oxford Academic (oup.com)
4. Filippo Sassetti – Wikipedia
5. Carlos Quiles, Fernando López-Menchero, A Grammar of modern Indo-European: Second Edition, 2009, 1.1.4.
6. Frawley, William, International Encylopedia of Linguistics, Volume 1, New York, 2003, p. 344
7. Quoted in Garland Cannon, “Jones’s ‘Sprung from some common source’: 1786-1986” in Sydney M. Lamb and E. Douglas Mitchell, (ed.)  Sprung from some common source: Investigations into the prehistory of Languages, California 1991, p. 31.
8. Garland Cannon, The Life and Mind of Oriental Jones: Sir William Jones, the father of modern linguistics, New York, 1990, p. 1.
9. Franklin, Michael J, Orientalist Jones: Sir William Jones, Poet, Lawyer and Linguist, 1746-1794, p.1.
10. As per the subtitle of Garland Cannon’s work, The Life and Mind of Oriental Jones: Sir William Jones, the father of modern linguistics
11. Siegbert Präwer (ed), The Romantic Period in Germany (Wiedenfeld and Nicolson), London.
12. http://www.goethezeitportal.de/fileadmin/PDF/kk/df/postkoloniale_studien/dusche_romantics_imagining_india.pdf
13. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mauricio-garrido/vedic-cosmology-integrating-god-and-physics_b_4612413.html