It was an innocent-enough lecture, certainly not one designed to revolutionize concepts of linguistics, national identity, religion and history, changing world demographics and politics forever. Sir William Jones, an associate barrister with the British High Court in Calcutta whose hobby and personal passion was linguistics, was giving an overview of the accomplishments of the Asiatik [sic] Society to that group in Bengal, entitled simply Third Anniversary Discourse. The year was 1786, and Sir Jones had been in India for nearly three years already, studying Sanskrit in his spare time. In the middle of his Discourse, he made a brief observation in an oh-by-the-way fashion that went like this:
In that single paragraph, Sir William made some powerful connections that blew the collective minds of Europe. Actually, others had already made this observation going back as far as the 16th century (English Jesuit Thomas Stevens and Italian merchant Fillipo Sasseti) but, they lacked the mass media of Sir Williams day and his scholarly gravitas. Still, Sir William had arrived at his conclusions by himself quite honestly, and as the words came from his mouth they made their way around the world. Sir William had connected intellectual dots for Europe (and later the world) that claimed Europes most treasured Classical languages, Greek and Latin, were not unique and had a family relationship with at least two ancient languages spoken very far indeed from Europe itself, and worse yet some or even most of Europes other languages may be thrown into the mix as well. Vulgaris!
Lets explore where some of the shock waves from Sir Williams statement led:
1. Linguistics: Sir William revolutionized what was at the time just a gentlemans hobby into a professional scholarly discipline, as droves tried to uncover and understand these linguistic relationships Sir William had alluded to, connections that others had vaguely noticed but it never occurred to anyone until then that languages could develop and change. Any moron could see the relationship between Italian and Spanish or German and Danish, but Jones forced academians to look at the reality that Russian, Albanian and French were also linguistic relatives. Then even languages like Persian and Urdu, languages spoken by [shudder] non-white peoples were apparently also in the mix! The modern study of linguistics owes its existence to Sir Williams shocking revelation.
2. Nationalism: Sir Williams claim that Greek, Latin, Sanskrit and Persian were related implied to scholars of the 18th century that there must have been a common ancestral language they all derived from, an Indo-European mother-language. Somebody then made the next step and said that since languages are spoken by people (and ethnicity can be defined by language), then a language group must represent a people, a nation [volk]. Europeans at the time were just beginning to understand Indian history, and they paid especial attention to the destruction of the ancient Dravidian civilization in India (c. 1500 B.C.) by the northern Indo-European-speaking invaders called Aryans, and well You know much of the rest. They did some fuzzy math and claimed that it all added up to a vastly superior people with an innately powerful culture that would overwhelm all others (Hey! That sounds like us!) but of course some problems arose when they looked around Europe and realized that clearly not all Aryans were fairing equally.
Germans trying to organize resistance to Napoleon latched in particular onto these ideas, and they added the belief that some Aryans had since the Good Old Days bred with inferior races and thus diluted their innate superiority i.e., the Slavs, the post-Roman Greeks, the Latins, etc. The German theorists also added a new idea to the process by launching a search for the area where the first Aryans must have lived and formed their Über-Kultur; the quest for the Indo-European ancestral homeland (Urheimat) was on! Naturally, it turned out to be in Northern Europe and so it turned out that Germans were the purest of the Aryans The German connection of Indo-Europeanness (called in German Indogermanische) with early Germanic origins was magical for other nations, and everyone in Europe began looking for their own imagined ethnic groups ancestral origins; they began to search for their own Urheimats, and the concept of ethnogenesis was born. French argued over Germanic and Celtic origins; Poles argued over Slavic and supposed Iranian Sarmatian origins; Romanians and Italians claimed Roman origins; English began to invent notions of native Anglo-Saxon culture versus foreign, imported Norman cultural concepts. Languages became standardized (while dialects were suppressed), native pure folk cultures were discovered (i.e., invented), and a major centuries-long love-affair with the Classical world turned instead towards a focus on modern Europeans Medieval ethnic origins. Notions of blonde-haired and blue-eyed sophisticated conquerors overrunning Eurasia in ancient times filled history books for a century and a half after the 18th century, only meeting the cold steel gaze of modern objective science after World War II.
Its difficult to emphasize how much creative scholarly work went into this sudden discovery of the past involved, because in order for this romantic past to be discovered it first needed to be invented. If I can quote Patrick Geary:
In other words, these early scholars created our modern sense of identity; the idea of country, of ethnicity, of race, and the belief that one can look at a modern country and trace back an unbroken, uninterrupted historical line 1000 or more years, connecting ancient peoples with a radically different idea of human groupings to our modern political and social organizations.
BTW, all of the notions Ive described in the past two paragraphs have since been challenged or outright dispelled, from the idea of a single mother Indo-European language all the way to the early linkage of languages with ethnic groups. Ethnicity itself is a very modern concept.
3. Religion: the implication of Sir Williams statement was that languages develop. Even in modern linguistics there is hot debate about how long it takes for languages to evolve, but it was immediately clear to everyone in the 1780s that whatever the exact length, it certainly took a long time. A real long time long enough to throw some doubt on a few Biblical passages. The Anglican Archbishop James Ussher had claimed in the 17th century that one could use the Bible to count back the generations to the beginning of Earth, and he concluded that Earths birth took place on Sunday, 23. October, 4004 B.C. 18th century historians were aware of history stretching as far back as 1000 B.C., and some were finding things that suggested history uncomfortably close to the 4004 date or perhaps worse. Now Sir Williams theories were implying that it took longer for languages to develop than the Bible itself allowed for and it was still 23 years before Charles Darwin would be born! The insolence!
Sir William was a dedicated barrister and part-time scholar, and had no political or nationalistic ambitions. He publically spoke against slavery and Europeans treatment of their colonial peoples, especially chastising the British for their belittlement of the Indians whose history he had come to respect. He died in 1794, completely unaware of the firestorms his little paragraph would ignite in the 19th century. Oops
(C. Renfrew, 1989: pg. 9)
In that single paragraph, Sir William made some powerful connections that blew the collective minds of Europe. Actually, others had already made this observation going back as far as the 16th century (English Jesuit Thomas Stevens and Italian merchant Fillipo Sasseti) but, they lacked the mass media of Sir Williams day and his scholarly gravitas. Still, Sir William had arrived at his conclusions by himself quite honestly, and as the words came from his mouth they made their way around the world. Sir William had connected intellectual dots for Europe (and later the world) that claimed Europes most treasured Classical languages, Greek and Latin, were not unique and had a family relationship with at least two ancient languages spoken very far indeed from Europe itself, and worse yet some or even most of Europes other languages may be thrown into the mix as well. Vulgaris!
Lets explore where some of the shock waves from Sir Williams statement led:
1. Linguistics: Sir William revolutionized what was at the time just a gentlemans hobby into a professional scholarly discipline, as droves tried to uncover and understand these linguistic relationships Sir William had alluded to, connections that others had vaguely noticed but it never occurred to anyone until then that languages could develop and change. Any moron could see the relationship between Italian and Spanish or German and Danish, but Jones forced academians to look at the reality that Russian, Albanian and French were also linguistic relatives. Then even languages like Persian and Urdu, languages spoken by [shudder] non-white peoples were apparently also in the mix! The modern study of linguistics owes its existence to Sir Williams shocking revelation.
2. Nationalism: Sir Williams claim that Greek, Latin, Sanskrit and Persian were related implied to scholars of the 18th century that there must have been a common ancestral language they all derived from, an Indo-European mother-language. Somebody then made the next step and said that since languages are spoken by people (and ethnicity can be defined by language), then a language group must represent a people, a nation [volk]. Europeans at the time were just beginning to understand Indian history, and they paid especial attention to the destruction of the ancient Dravidian civilization in India (c. 1500 B.C.) by the northern Indo-European-speaking invaders called Aryans, and well You know much of the rest. They did some fuzzy math and claimed that it all added up to a vastly superior people with an innately powerful culture that would overwhelm all others (Hey! That sounds like us!) but of course some problems arose when they looked around Europe and realized that clearly not all Aryans were fairing equally.
Germans trying to organize resistance to Napoleon latched in particular onto these ideas, and they added the belief that some Aryans had since the Good Old Days bred with inferior races and thus diluted their innate superiority i.e., the Slavs, the post-Roman Greeks, the Latins, etc. The German theorists also added a new idea to the process by launching a search for the area where the first Aryans must have lived and formed their Über-Kultur; the quest for the Indo-European ancestral homeland (Urheimat) was on! Naturally, it turned out to be in Northern Europe and so it turned out that Germans were the purest of the Aryans The German connection of Indo-Europeanness (called in German Indogermanische) with early Germanic origins was magical for other nations, and everyone in Europe began looking for their own imagined ethnic groups ancestral origins; they began to search for their own Urheimats, and the concept of ethnogenesis was born. French argued over Germanic and Celtic origins; Poles argued over Slavic and supposed Iranian Sarmatian origins; Romanians and Italians claimed Roman origins; English began to invent notions of native Anglo-Saxon culture versus foreign, imported Norman cultural concepts. Languages became standardized (while dialects were suppressed), native pure folk cultures were discovered (i.e., invented), and a major centuries-long love-affair with the Classical world turned instead towards a focus on modern Europeans Medieval ethnic origins. Notions of blonde-haired and blue-eyed sophisticated conquerors overrunning Eurasia in ancient times filled history books for a century and a half after the 18th century, only meeting the cold steel gaze of modern objective science after World War II.
Its difficult to emphasize how much creative scholarly work went into this sudden discovery of the past involved, because in order for this romantic past to be discovered it first needed to be invented. If I can quote Patrick Geary:
(P. Geary, 2002: Pg. 28)
In other words, these early scholars created our modern sense of identity; the idea of country, of ethnicity, of race, and the belief that one can look at a modern country and trace back an unbroken, uninterrupted historical line 1000 or more years, connecting ancient peoples with a radically different idea of human groupings to our modern political and social organizations.
BTW, all of the notions Ive described in the past two paragraphs have since been challenged or outright dispelled, from the idea of a single mother Indo-European language all the way to the early linkage of languages with ethnic groups. Ethnicity itself is a very modern concept.
3. Religion: the implication of Sir Williams statement was that languages develop. Even in modern linguistics there is hot debate about how long it takes for languages to evolve, but it was immediately clear to everyone in the 1780s that whatever the exact length, it certainly took a long time. A real long time long enough to throw some doubt on a few Biblical passages. The Anglican Archbishop James Ussher had claimed in the 17th century that one could use the Bible to count back the generations to the beginning of Earth, and he concluded that Earths birth took place on Sunday, 23. October, 4004 B.C. 18th century historians were aware of history stretching as far back as 1000 B.C., and some were finding things that suggested history uncomfortably close to the 4004 date or perhaps worse. Now Sir Williams theories were implying that it took longer for languages to develop than the Bible itself allowed for and it was still 23 years before Charles Darwin would be born! The insolence!
Sir William was a dedicated barrister and part-time scholar, and had no political or nationalistic ambitions. He publically spoke against slavery and Europeans treatment of their colonial peoples, especially chastising the British for their belittlement of the Indians whose history he had come to respect. He died in 1794, completely unaware of the firestorms his little paragraph would ignite in the 19th century. Oops
Thanks YNCS!
