SIR WILLIAM JONES (1746-1794)

Sir William Jones

Franklin Edgerton

The two-hundredth anniversary of the birth of Sir William Jones (September 28, 1746) should not pass without notice in this Society. It is not easy to present a complete and true picture of his versatile and fascinating personality. In this sketch we shall look at him primarily as an Indologist. Yet we should not be justified in ignoring the various other ways in which he distinguished himself, nor yet the personal traits which helped to win him the apparently universal admiration and affection of all who knew him ; some of these traits are reflected in his writings. If his too brief life had been cut off shortly before its last decade, he would have died without the slightest contact with Indian culture. Yet he would still have held a secure position, and a not unimportant one, among the notable Englishmen of his time.

He showed his phenomenal gift for languages as a schoolboy at Harrow. He easily outstripped his fellow-students, and apparently even his teachers, in Latin and Greek, which he quickly learned not only to read but to write with fluency and grace, in verse as well as prose. The head-master of Harrow was heard to say ‘ that Jones knew more Greek than himself.’¹ A schoolfellow wrote later that’ he imitated the choruses of Sophocles so successfully that his writings seemed to be original Greek compositions.’² While at Harrow he learned French and Italian, largely in the vacations, and began Hebrew and Arabic.

In March, 1764, he was matriculated at Oxford, and a few months later was granted a scholarship. He was so proficient in Latin and Greek that both university lectures and tutorial conferences were of scant interest to him. He continued to read avidly but privately in the classical languages, and also in French, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese ; later, in 1767, he took up German. But he threw himself with special enthusiasm into the study of Arabic and Persian. He learned to speak Arabic from a Syrian named Mirza whom he discovered in London and brought to Oxford at his own expense. In Persian he seems to have been his own teacher ; he progressed rapidly, and composed a ‘ Grammar of the Persian Language,’ which was published in 1771. In 1768 Christian VII, King of Denmark, engaged him to translate from Persian into French a manuscript Life of Nadir Shah, which belonged to the king. This, his first book, was published in 1770, along with a ‘ Traité sur la Poésie Orientale ‘ and a translation of some of the odes of Hafiz into French verse. In 1772 he published ‘ Poems, consisting chiefly of translations from the Asiatick Languages, with two Essays on the Poetry of the Eastern Nations, and on the Arts called Imitative ‘ ; and in 1774, in Latin, ‘ Poeseos Asiaticae Commentariorum Libri Sex.’ By this time he ranked as probably the leading orientalist of England.

In 1766 he was elected a fellow of University College, Oxford ; in 1768 he received the B.A., and in 1773 the M.A. In 1772 he was made a Fellow of the Royal Society, and in 1773 a member of the Literary Club presided over by Samuel Johnson, being elected at the same time with Garrick. Johnson is said to have called him ‘ one of the most enlightened of the sons of men.’³ He became intimate with many prominent British intellectuals, including Burke and Gibbon, and corresponded with leading continental scholars, such as the Dutch Arabist Schultens. It should be added that he was neither a pedant nor a cloistered recluse. He took lessons in such gentlemanly arts as dancing and fencing. His social graces made him as welcome a guest in drawing-rooms as in literary and learned gatherings.

However, for financial reasons, and with freely expressed regrets, he felt obliged to turn aside from orientalism and literature and take up the law as a profession. He was called to the bar at the Middle Temple in 1774. The influence of this new interest, combined with his classical learning, was shown in his translation of the ‘ Speeches of Isaeus on Causes concerning the Law of Succession to Property at Athens ‘ (1778). In 1781 appeared his most celebrated publication in the law, ‘ An essay on the law of bailments.’ Of this minor legal classic an American juristic writer, said to have been Justice Story, wrote in 1817 that if Jones had never written anything else,’ he would have left a name unrivalled in the common law for philosophical accuracy, elegant learning, and finished analysis.’⁴

Since 1778⁵ Jones had been a candidate for appointment to a vacant judgeship in the British court in Calcutta. But his strong and open disapproval of the American war had made the British administration unwilling to appoint him. Finally, in March, 1783, the coalition ministry of the Duke of Portland granted him the post, along with a knighthood. He presently married Anna Maria Shipley, daughter of the Bishop of St. Asaph, and in April they sailed for India. They arrived in September, and he entered on his court duties in December.

In January, 1784, he founded the ‘ Asiatick Society’ (later ‘Asiatic Society of Bengal’ ; the first meeting was January 15), and became its first President, an office which he held for the rest of his life. The permanence and success of the Society was largely due to his energy and scholarship. He was the author of a substantial part of the contents of the first four volumes of its Transactions, published under the title Asiatick Researches, beginning in 1788 ; the fourth volume appeared after his death.

His friend and biographer Lord Teignmouth gives one to understand that about the time of the ‘ first meeting [of this Society] after the institution was completed,’ when he ‘ unfolded, in an elegant and appropriate address, the objects proposed for their researches, . . . he determined to commence without loss of time the study of the Sanscrit. His reflection had before suggested, that a knowledge of this ancient tongue would be of the greatest utility, in enabling him to discharge with confidence and satisfaction to himself, the duties of a judge ; and he soon discovered, what subsequent experience fully confirmed, that no reliance could be placed on the opinions or interpretations of the professors of the Hindu law, unless he were qualified to examine their authorities and quotations, and detect their errors and misrepresentations. On the other hand, he knew that all attempts to explore the religion or literature of India, through any other medium than a knowledge of the Sanscrit, must be imperfect and unsatisfactory. ... As a lawyer, he knew the value and importance of original documents and records, and as a scholar and man of science, he disdained the idea of amusing the learned world, with secondary information . . . when he had the means of access to the original sources.’⁶

Undoubtedly this is an accurate statement of Jones’s motives in beginning the study of Sanskrit. But Lord Teignmouth’s memory betrayed him as to the time when he began that study, which was not until the late summer of 1785.⁷ The date is of some importance. Since Jones died in April, 1794, all his knowledge of Sanskrit was acquired in less than nine years, instead of somewhat more than ten. The difference will not seem slight if we recall that those nine years were very busy ones for him in other ways. His duties as judge took up a large part of his days, except for vacations ; and Sanskrit was only one of a number of incidental activities for him.

On February 2, 1786, only about half a year after he began to study Sanskrit, he delivered his third ‘ anniversary discourse’ before the ‘ Asiatick Society,’ which contains the following celebrated passage:

‘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, both in the roots of verbs and in the forms of grammar, 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 : there is a similar reason, though not quite so forcible, for supposing that both the Gothick and the Celtick, though blended with a very different idiom, had the same origin with the Sanscrit; and the old Persian might be added to the same family.’⁸

Here we have the first known printed statement of the fundamental postulate of Indo-European comparative grammar ; more than that, of comparative linguistics as a whole. That languages often resemble each other is obvious enough. Even the specific fact that Sanskrit resembles Greek and Latin had been seen before. But no one before Jones had drawn the inference that these resemblances must be explained by the assumption of common descent from a hypothetical earlier language ‘ which, perhaps, no longer exists.’ At this moment modern comparative grammar was born.⁹

Later in the same discourse¹⁰ Jones identified the Hitopadeśa as the original book of fables translated into Pahlavi from Sanskrit in the sixth century under the Persian king ‘ Anúshireván’ (Khosrau Anōsharvān),—the book then called (‘ ridiculously,’ says Jones) the fables of Pilpay. It is now known that the Hitopadeśa is (in large part) a late version of the Pancatantra, of which a different and much earlier Sanskrit version (now lost) was translated into Pahlavi in the sixth century, to be later retranslated from Pahlavi into Arabic as the ‘ Kalila and Dimna,’ which became the source of many European versions. But Jones was substantially right, and was apparently the first to identify a close relative of the lost Sanskrit original.¹¹

He was the first to translate the Śakuntalā, the greatest work of Indian dramatic literature, into a western language : ‘ Sacontalá ; or, the fatal ring : an Indian drama by Cálidás.’¹² Tho the translation is entirely in prose, the chaste and dignified English style captured the spirit of the original so well that the work won great popularity in Europe. It was quickly retranslated into several continental languages. The German version, by Georg Forster (1791), aroused the unbounded enthusiasm of Herder and of Goethe, who expressed his feelings in a celebrated verse:

Willst du die Blüte des frühen, die Früchte des späteren Jahres,

Willst du, was reizt und entzückt, willst du, was sättigt und nährt,

Willst du den Himmel, die Erde mit Einem Namen begreifen,

Nenn’ ich, Sakontala, dich, und so ist alles gesagt.

Jones was also the first to translate (not quite completely) the Gltagovinda,¹³ called the ‘ Indian Song of Songs.’ But the charm of that work depends so largely on the exquisite beauty of its lyric measures that his English rendering, wholly in prose, failed to rouse as much interest in Europe as his other translations.

He was the first European to print the original text of any Sanskrit work ; namely, the Rtusamhāra.¹⁴

There remains to be mentioned his most ambitious and important translation from Sanskrit, that of the ‘ law-book ‘ of Manu.¹⁵ At least since 1786 he had conceived the idea of compiling, with a staff of Indian scholars, a complete codified digest of Hindu (and another of Mohammedan) law, comparable to the code of Justinian.¹⁶ In March, 1788,¹⁷ he formally laid this project before the Governor- General, who approved it; whereupon Jones gathered a staff of Indians and set them to work, giving as much of his spare time as he could to supervision. He did not live to see any results published, but one volume appeared after his death.¹⁸ A much more important by-product was his own English version of Manu, which is still worth reading, if only for its fine, lofty, vigorous, and slightly archaizing style, reminding one not infrequently of the King James Bible. It is on the whole a reliable rendering of the text as interpreted by Kullūka, the best-known ancient commentator. Almost a hundred years later, it remained the only complete translation which Georg Biihler thought it worth while to use ‘ carefully ‘ in preparing his new version, which is still the most scholarly one in existence.¹⁹

His Indological learning spread far beyond the limits of his translations from the Sanskrit. He wrote on Indian music,²⁰ on the game of chess,²¹ on Indian chronology,²² and on the solar zodiac and the lunar year of the Hindus.²³

‘His last and favourite pursuit (says his biographer) was the study of botany. It constituted the principal amusement of his leisure hours. In the arrangement of Linnaeus, he discovered system, truth, and science, which never failed to captivate and engage his attention ; and from the proofs which he has exhibited of his progress in botany, we may conclude, if he had lived, that he would have extended the discoveries in that science.’²⁴ He published enough on Indian botany at least to demonstrate his keen interest in the subject. It was a graceful compliment which William Roxburgh, the founder of scientific Indian botany, paid him in giving the name Jonesia asoka to the aśoka, one of the most famous and beautiful trees of India.²⁵

Lord Teignmouth²⁶ quotes ‘from a paper in the handwriting of Sir William Jones’ the following list of his linguistic accomplishments : ‘ Eight languages studied critically : English, Latin, French, Italian, Greek, Arabic, Persian, Sanscrit. Eight studied less perfectly, but all intelligible with a dictionary : Spanish, Portuguese, German, Runick, Hebrew, Bengali, Hindi, Turkish. Twelve studied least perfectly but all attainable : Tibetian, Pâli, Pahlavi, Deri (i.e. Gabri or Gebri, an Iranian dialect, spoken by the Zoroastrian Persians), Russian, Syriac, Ethiopic, Coptic, Welsh, Swedish, Dutch, Chinese. Twenty-eight languages.’ He knew enough Chinese to translate two odes from the Book of Odes.²⁷

We have seen that he was not only a practical linguist, but a linguistic scientist of remarkable insight for his day. He was, however, also a philologist in the sense in which linguists tend to use the word : he used languages as a key to the culture of peoples, which was his major interest as a humanistic scholar. Every aspect of human civilization attracted him : belles-lettres, philosophy, religion, law, mathematics, natural science, art, music, to name only some on which he wrote for publication. His fine and catholic taste saw aesthetic beauties in many different styles of literature. He speculated on comparative religion, mythology, and cultural history ; here his work²⁸ has hardly more than historic interest for us, but in its day it contained much that was both new and factual. He compared the philosophy of India with that of Greece and Rome as early as February, 1786 ;²⁹ in a posthumous article³⁰ he repeats such comparisons, mentioning Pythagoras, Zeno, and Plato, and also unnamed eighteenth-century writers, perhaps referring to Berkeley. He is, however, cautious and sensible about genetic relationships, only very tentatively suggesting that Greek philosophers may have been influenced by Indians, or both by a common unknown source.

There have not been wanting, in modern times, severe scholars who have referred to him slightingly as a sentimental dilettante.³¹ He was a man of deep human feeling and sensitivity, and so, in a good sense, sentimental. And it is true that he was not, and never claimed to be, a professional Indologist. It has been truly said that Colebrooke, rather than Jones, was the first professional Sanskrit philologist. By profession he was a lawyer, by occupation a judge. He was highly conscientious in the performance of his official, as of all other, duties ; while the court was in session they left him little time for Sanskrit and other avocations. Only during vacations could he work hard at it. He wrote to Wilkins on September 17, 1785 : ‘... at Calcutta, my mornings are never my own, and I cannot study at night without endangering my health.’ This complaint is typical. The climate was very hard on him ; it disabled him for considerable periods ; indeed, it may be said that it was finally responsible for his death. Moreover, he had no Whitney’s Grammar or Lanman’s Reader. He learned Sanskrit the hard way, directly from texts, with only Indians to help interpret them. Their grammatical notions were of course based on Pānini’s grammar, a work of intellectual genius no doubt, but not exactly calculated to simplify the subject for an uninitiated westerner.

Under all these circumstances it is, I submit, amazing that he acquired so much real Sanskrit learning, and published so much that is sound and valuable, in less than nine years. I wonder, for instance, how many contemporary western professors of Sanskrit have read through the whole of Śamkara’s commentary on the Vedānta Sūtras, —one of the most important works of classical Indian philosophy ? (I am at liberty to betray one who has not.) Jones did, ‘with great attention . . . [it] exhibits a perspicuous account of all other Indian schools ... It is not possible, indeed, to speak with too much applause of so excellent a work ; and I am confident in asserting, that, until an accurate translation of it shall appear in some European language, the general history of philosophy must remain incomplete.’³² Many able western scholars have spoken of this work with equal enthusiasm. And a westerner, even today, who has read it ‘with great attention’ from cover to cover is, I think, something more that a dilettante in Sanskrit.

Politically, Jones was an advanced democrat ; for his time, a bit of a ‘radical.’ ‘On the people depend the welfare, the security, and the permanence of every legal government,’ he wrote ; ‘in the people must reside all substantial power ; and to the people must all those, in whose ability and knowledge we sometimes wisely, often imprudently confide, be always accountable for the due exercise of that power with which they are for a time entrusted.’³³ ‘My opinion is, that power should always be distrusted, in whatever hands it is placed.’³⁴ A Calcutta barrister wrote of him in a private letter on November 22, 1791, when the French Revolution was in everyone’s thoughts : ‘The flame of liberty burns very ardently in his mind, and has, I fear, consumed everything monarchical and aristocratical it found there. I do not, I own, like to part either with king or nobles, and of course differ a little with sir William as to present European politics, but I love and respect him for his benevolence, his genius, his learning and his integrity.’³⁵

The sincerity of this last sentiment, written in a private letter to a friend in distant Ireland, can not be questioned. So far as I have discovered, all who knew Jones formed a like estimate of his character. He was a thorough democrat, not only in theory but in practice. He believed firmly in human dignity, in the right of every man to ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’ And he made that belief a guide to the conduct of his life.

His burning words on slavery are worth quoting : ‘I pass with haste by the coast of Africa, whence my mind turns with indignation at the abominable traffic in the human species, from which a part of our countrymen dare to derive their most inauspicious wealth. Sugar, it has been said, would be dear if it were not worked by Blacks in the Western islands ; as if the most laborious, the most dangerous works, were not carried on in every country, but chiefly in England, by free men ; . . . but let sugar be as dear as it may, it is better to eat none, to eat honey, if sweetness only be palatable ; better to eat aloes or coloquintida than violate a primary law of nature, impressed on every heart not imbruted by avarice, than rob one human creature of those eternal rights, of which no law upon earth can justly deprive him.’³⁶

In India he was conspicuous among his countrymen by his human attitude towards Indians, including especially those in any way dependent on him. ‘The candour and complacency’ are noted ‘with which he gave his attention to all persons, of whatever quality, talents, or education.’³⁷ ‘He liberally rewarded those by whom he was served and assisted, and his dependents were treated by him as friends . . . The pundits who were in the habit of attending him, when I saw them at a public durbar, a few days after [his death], could neither restrain their tears for his loss, nor find terms to express their admiration at the wonderful progress which he had made, in the sciences which they professed.’³⁸

In a memorial address to the Asiatick Society after his death, his successor as president said : ‘To you who knew him, it cannot be necessary for me to expatiate on the independence of his integrity, his humanity, probity, or benevolence, which every living creature participated ; on the affability of his conversation and manners, or his modest unassuming deportment ;³⁹ nor need I remark, that he was totally free from pedantry, as well as from arrogance and self sufficiency which sometimes accompany and disgrace the greatest abilities ; his presence was the delight of every society, which his conversation exhilarated and improved, and the public have not only to lament the loss of his talents and abilities, but that of his example.’⁴⁰ There is reason to believe that these words were both more sincere, and more generally accepted by the audience as true, than is often the case with such formal eulogies of the dead.

‘The following Epitaph’, writes Lord Teignmouth,⁴¹ ‘evidently intended for himself, was written by Sir William Jones, a short time only before his demise.’

AN EPITAPH
Here was deposited,
the mortal part of a man,
who feared GOD, but not death ;
and maintained independence,
but sought not riches ;
who thought
none below him, but the base and unjust,
none above him, but the wise and virtuous ;
who loved
his parents, kindred, friends, country,
with an ardour
which was the chief source of
all his pleasures and all his pains :
and who, having devoted
his life to their service,
and to
the improvement of his mind,
resigned it calmly,
giving glory to his Creator,
wishing peace on earth,
and with
good-will to all creatures,
on the [Twenty-seventh] day of [April]
in the year of our blessed Redeemer,
One Thousand Seven Hundred [and Ninety-four].

Bibliographical Notes.

The most important source, next to his own works, is the life by Lord Teignmouth (1751-1834), born John Shore, who was a civil servant in India for several long periods ; in 1792 he was appointed Governor-General of India and made a baronet ; on Jones’s death he succeeded him as president of the Asiatick Society ; in 1798 he was created Baron Teignmouth of the Irish peerage. He edited and published Jones’s Works, first in 6 vols., 1799 ; two supplementary volumes appeared in 1801, and a Life by Teignmouth in 1804 (Dict. Nat. Biog. 10.1065). The whole was reprinted in 13 vols., of which the first two comprise the life : The Works of Sir William Jones. With the life of the author, by Lord Teignmouth : London, 1807. This is the only edition which I have seen and used ; it is referred to as ‘Life’ (1 and 2) or ‘Works’ (3-13). Like many official biographies, the life is over-discreet for our tastes, and otherwise imperfect. A modern biography, using materials unknown to Teignmouth or insufficiently utilized by him, would be very desirable.

Many of Jones’s monographs appeared first in ‘Asiatick Researches’ (published by the Asiatick Society), vols. 1-4 (1788-95). In this article, these arereferred to as ‘As. Res.’ with volume and page numbers, sometimes with additional reference to the Works, 1807 ed.

The sketch in the Dictionary of National Biography (10.1062-5), by H. Morse Stephens, is useful though not wholly free from errors.

The American Oriental Society possesses copies made by Fitzedward Hall of 13 letters from Jones to Charles Wilkins ; cf. PAOS for October, 1870 (JAOS 9. lxxxviii), where some brief extracts are printed. This article presents some brief extracts from these letters, copied by the writer. The originals are stated by Hall to have belonged to ‘Charles H. Moore, Esquire ;’ perhaps Charles Herbert Moore (1840-1930, see Diet. Amer. Biog. 13.116-7). I have made unsuccessful attempts to trace the originals to their present whereabouts.

The volumes of the (English) Historical Manuscripts Commission contain some letters referring to Jones, listed in the Index volume (1935). Some of these are cited in this paper. In the 2d Report, 13, there is mention (with a few citations) of a collection of between 70 and 80 of Jones’s letters, of which only a few were published by Teignmouth, in Spencer House. In Jones’s youth he acted as tutor to Earl Spencer’s son and heir, Lord Althorp, and his friendly relations with the family were permanent.

A. J. Arberry, ‘British Orientalists,’ London, 1943, contains on pp. 29-30 a brief sketch of Jones, whom he calls ‘truly the father of British orientalism ;’ also (opposite p. 32) a reproduction in colors of Sir Joshua Reynolds’s portrait of Jones, ‘by courtesy of Earl Spencer.’

More valuable is the penetrating sketch in Ernst Windisch, ‘Geschichte der Sanskrit-Philologie und indischen Altertumskunde,’ Erster Teil, Strassburg, 1917, 23-26.

G. Birkbeck Hill’s edition of Boswell’s Johnson (6 vols., Oxford, 1887 ; revised ed. by L. F. Powell, Oxford, 1934—), and his ‘Johnsonian Miscellanies’ (2 vols., Oxford, 1897), contain a number of important references to Jones ; see the indexes to these works, and references in my notes.

The Boswell papers contain some references to Jones, kindly made known to me by Professor Frederick A. Pottle ; but they do not add much to what was already known from G. B. Hill’s works.

Source : Franklin Edgerton, ‘Sir William Jones : 1746-1794,’ Journal of the American Oriental Society 66.230-239 (1946). By permission of the Journal of the American Oriental Society, and Mrs. Franklin Edgerton.

¹ Life 1.37 ; cf. 1.28.

² Ibid. 1.50.

³ G. Birkbeck Hill, ‘Johnsonian Miscellanies,’ 2.363.

⁴ It was reprinted, under the editorship of various scholars, at least half a dozen times, as recently as 1834 in England, and 1836 in America (Diet. Nat. Biog. 10.1065). The Library of the Yale School of Law contains the first edition and five later editions. In John William Smith’s ‘ Leading Cases’ it is cited repeatedly in the discussion of Coggs vs. Bernard ; once where the author differs from Jones, he does so ‘ with due submission to so great an authority as Sir William Jones’ (13th ed., London, 1929, 1.196; other references 1.193, 200, 248).—Justice (of the U.S. Supreme Court) Joseph Story (1779-1845) wrote a book ‘Commentaries on the law of bailments’ (1st ed. reportedly 1832), of which the 3d ed. (Boston and London, 1843), which I have used, cites Jones’s Essay constantly in text and footnotes, and refers to his ‘ elegant genius’ on p. 11. The quotation in my text is attributed to Story by H. M[orse] Sftephens] in Diet. Nat. Biog. 10.1063. It appeared anonymously in the North American Review 6.46-7 (November, 1817), in a review of a legal work. As evidence of Jones’s scholarly and personal reputation a fuller extract may be of interest. The writer speaks first of ‘. . . Lord Holt, who had the good sense to incorporate into the English code, that system which the text and the commentaries of the civil law had already built up on the continent of Europe. What remained to give perfect symmetry and connexion to all parts of that system, and to refer it to its principles, has been accomplished in our times by the incomparable essay of Sir William Jones, a man, of whom it is difficult to say, which is most worthy of admiration, the splendour of his genius, the rareness and extent of his acquirements, or the unspotted purity of his life. Had he never written any thing but his Essay on Bailments, he would have left a name unrivalled in the common law, for philosophical accuracy, elegant learning, and finished analysis. Even cold and cautious as is the habit, if not the structure, of a professional mind, it is impossible to suppress enthusiasm, when we contemplate such a man.’ Again on pp. 61-2 of the same review, he cites, from the preface to the speeches of Isaeus, Jones’s words which ‘ beautifully illustrate ‘ the logical training involved in the ‘ science of special pleading,’ and adds : ‘ Such commendation supersedes the necessity of all further discussion of the importance of pleading.’

⁵ A letter from Jones to Lloyd Kenyon, Attorney General, dated April 30, 1782 (Hist. Mss. Comm. 14th Report, App. 4, p. 512), says that he had ‘ been four years hoping to attain ‘ this appointment.

⁶ Life 2.26-8.

⁷ On April 24, 1784, he wrote to Charles Wilkins : ‘ If envy can exist with an anxious wish of all possible entertainment and reputation to the person envied, I am not free from that passion, when I think of the infinite pleasure which you must receive from a subject so new and interesting [as Sanskrit], Happy should I be to follow you in the same track ; but life is too short and my necessary business too long for me to think at my age of acquiring a new language [emphasis supplied] ... All my hopes therefore (as the Persian translations from the Shanscrit are so defective) of being acquainted with the poetry, philosophy, and arts of the Hindús, are grounded on the expectation of living to see the fruits of your learned labours.’ On March 1, 1785, he wrote to the same : ‘ I have just received from Benares a S’hanscrit book, which puzzled me at first, and will, I hope, continue to puzzle, till it enlightens, me . .. A version of this curious work [the Mānava Dharma Šāstra] is promised, and, when it comes, I will set about learning the original, if I can procure assistance from a good Pendit.’ On July 26, 1785, he wrote to the same (‘ In Court,’ i.e. in Calcutta) : ‘ I wish ... to know how Amrut or Amurt [amrta] is written in Déva nágry ;’ this question proves that he can hardly have begun the study of Sanskrit at that time. But by September 17, 1785 (letter to the same) he was studying Sanskrit grammar, tho not with a ‘ Pendit’ ; only with ‘ a pleasant old man of the medical cast, who teaches me all he knows of the Grammar ; and I hope to read the Hit Upadès, or some other story-book, with him. My great object is the Dherme Sastra [query : Sastru ? The final e of ‘ Dherme ‘ is clear], to which I shall arrive by degrees.’—In Hist. Mss. Comm. 2d Report, 13, the following entry relates to a Jones letter in Spencer House (see my bibliographical notes) : ‘ 1783, Creshna-nagar : Is charmed with Sanscrit . . . The Brahmins do not know how much he is assisted by Latin and Greek.’ The year 1783 cannot be the correct date. He landed in India in September of that year ; and in April, 1784 (see above), he still expected never to learn Sanskrit. His summer house in Krishnanagar was first occupied in 1785 (Life 2.65, where the name is spelled ‘ Crishnagur ‘). Probably the true date of the letter in question is 1785.

⁸ As. Res. 1.442-3.

⁹ In writing ‘ which, perhaps, no longer exists,’ I believe that he probably meant ‘ of which, perhaps, no records now exist.’ In the same discourse, As. Res. 1.425, he records the belief ‘that Pythagoras and Plato derived their sublime theories from the same fountain with the sages of India ; ‘ i.e. that Greek and Hindu philosophy, in part, were genetically related, not because either borrowed from the other, or both from any actually recorded third source, but by descent from a common source which he doubtless thought ‘ perhaps no longer exists ‘ in records (tho he does not say so specifically). His thoughts were oriented in that direction.

A French Jesuit missionary at Pondichery, G. L. Coeurdoux, in a private letter written in 1767, is often said to have anticipated him. This letter was first published with a monograph by Anquetil Duperron, in 1808, after Anquetil’s death (Paris : Mémoires de littérature ... de l’Académie royale des inscriptions et belles-lettres, tome XLIX, pp. 647-667). La Vallée-Poussin (Indo-européens et Indo-iraniens, Paris, 1924, p. 3) calls Coeurdoux ‘le premier savant qui fit de la grammaire comparée,’ and others have written similarly.

I have made a careful study of Coeurdoux’s letter, and venture to say that it does not support this opinion. Coeurdoux lists a number of Sanskrit-Greek-Latin cognates, and asks, how are they to be explained ? He suggests (660) that they might be due to one of six possible causes, the sixth being ‘a common origin,’— or ‘to several of these causes together.’ He considers the first five and finds them insufficient. Then (664) : ‘Let us turn to the sixth cause. An astounding miracle [that which followed the Tower of Babel] was needed to oblige men, by the confusion which it introduced in their language, to go and populate the various regions of the earth, according to the command they had received. But was this confusion so total, that there remained no common words at all in the new languages ? . . . Some common terms remained in the new languages ; a large number have been lost with the lapse of time ; others have been so disfigured as to become unrecognizable.’ [This theory proves too much. Such common words should have remained in all human languages, not merely in what we now call Indo-European languages. Perhaps Coeurdoux obscurely felt this weakness. At any rate he continues :] The seven sons of Japhet ‘were no doubt heads of as many great families, each one of which spoke one of the new original languages, such as Latin, Greek, Slavonic’ and Sanskrit. [But no common ‘ur-Japhetic’ language is in any way suggested.] These seven Japhetic tribes, starting on their wanderings, remained for some time in mutual contact. During this period their languages borrowed from each other ; ‘that is why there is some Greek and Latin in Sanskrit, and some Sanskrit in Latin and Greek’ (665). ‘Before their total separation, the communication which they had together mixed their languages a little ; and traces of this ancient mixture have remained, in the common words which still exist, and a part of which I have reported’ (667).

It seems to me evident that Coeurdoux either did not distinguish clearly between linguistic inheritances from a common source, and later borrowings ; or that, if and in so far as he made such a distinction at all, he attributed his Sanskrit-Greek-Latin cognates to borrowing rather than to common inheritance. That is, he certainly failed to grasp clearly the fundamental postulate of modern comparative grammar ; and if he envisioned it at all (thru the mythic haze of Babel) he failed to apply it to his own etymological correspondences, which he erroneously explained as due to borrowing. It may therefore be questioned whether he was ‘the first scholar who worked at comparative grammar.’ We may ignore the fact that his letter was not published till 1808, long after Jones and others (who could not have known anything about him) had written on the subject. His letter of 1767 did not, in fact, explain the correspondences between Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin by inheritance from a common language. The only common language he assumed was that before Babel, therefore common to all men. This view justified etymological equations between any languages on earth, such as were commonly accepted before Jones, and even after him, e.g. by J. C. Adelung. (See Benfey, Geschichte der Sprachwissenschaft, 356, where it is unfairly suggested that Jones too might have compared Sanskrit with Semitic and other non-IE. languages if he had known the latter. Jones knew Arabic extremely well ; he had a fair knowledge of Hebrew, Syriac, and Ethiopie, and a more than fair knowledge of Turkish ; but he knew better than to make etymological equations between them and Sanskrit.) Despite La Vallée-Poussin and others, it seems to me that Jones may still be called the first to see what the correspondences between Sanskrit and Greek, Latin, etc., really meant.

Finally, I owe to M. Bréal (p. xvii of his ‘Introduction à la grammaire comparée des langues indo-européennes,’ a translation of Bopp ; Paris, 1866) a reference to two still earlier publications of the French Academy (Histoire de l’Académie royale des inscriptions et belles-lettres, XVIII, 49-71 and XXI, 7-19 : Paris, 1753 and 1754 ; the lectures of which these papers are abstracts seem to have been presented orally between 1744 and 1747), by Fréret : ‘Vues générales sur l’origine et le mélange des anciennes Nations, et sur la manière d’en étudier l’histoire,’ and ‘Observations générales sur l’origine et sur l’ancienne histoire des premiers habitants de la Grèce.’ Bréal says that Fréret (who of course knew nothing of Sanskrit) ‘essaye déjà la méthode et présente quelquesunes des découvertes de la linguistique moderne.’ I have read Fréret with interest, and see what Bréal meant. But I would underscore the words essaye and présente. The time was not ripe for anything more than a vague, fumbling, and largely speculative approach to ‘the method and discoveries of modern linguistics.’ That is really all that Fréret gives, mingled with a great deal of extraneous and irrelevant matter. It is not at all to his discredit that he got no farther.

¹⁰ As. Res. 1.429.

¹¹ The first printed translation of the Hitopadeśa was that by Charles Wilkins (Bath and London, 1787), who cites Jones on its relation to the fables of ‘Pilpay.’ Jones himself prepared a translation, which was published only after his death, in 1799, and reprinted in Vol. 13 of the 1807 edition of his Works. At the end of his preface to the ‘Sacontalá’ he says (Works, 1807 ed., 9.373) that he undertook it, evidently in the autumn of 1785 (cf. the reference to it in the letter of September 17, 1785,'merely as an exercise in learning Sanscrit, three years before I knew that Mr. Wilkins .. . had any thought of giving the same work to the publick. ‘It is composed in his usual choice and vigorous English style, but naturally shows less sure command of Sanskrit than his other translations. He would doubtless not have approved the publication of it.-The interval of ‘three years’ need not be questioned, for he did not receive Wilkins's book until the end of 1788 or early in 1789. He wrote to Wilkins on February 27, 1789, that he had ‘made as hearty a meal of your Hitópadésa‘ (as of Wilkins's earlier Bhagavad Gita translation), which clearly shows that he had only recently received it.

¹² Calcutta, 1789 ; reissued in London, 1790, and again 1792 ; in Edinburgh, 1796 ; and in Vol. 6 of the Works, 1799 (Vol. 9 of the 2d ed., 1807).

¹³ As. Res. 3.185-207 ; reprinted in the Works (1807 ed., Vol. 4, 236-268), and again in 1894 (Calcutta, publ. Sarat Chandra Haldar ; citation from Emeneau, Union list of printed Indie texts and translations, 105).—The thirteenth volume of the 1807 edition of his Works contains a few other translations of brief passages from Sanskrit works, even selections from Vedas and Upanisads ; such as the Gāyatrī stanza (the ‘ holiest verse of the Vedas,’ p. 367), the Īśāvāsya (or Īśā) Upaniṣad (p. 374), and the fine passage from the Brhad Ᾱranyaka (Kāņva recension, 3.9.28) in which the structure of man is compared to that of a tree (p. 378).

¹⁴ ‘The seasons : a descriptive poem by Cálidás in the original Sanscrit.’ Calcutta, 1792. (In Bengali characters.) Reproduced in facsimile by H. Kreyenborg, Hannover, 1924. The attribution to Kālidāsa is now doubted by many scholars.

¹⁵ ‘Institutes of Hindu law : or, the ordinances of Manu, according to the gloss of Cullúca . . . verbally translated from the original Sanscrit.’ Calcutta, 1794 ; reprinted London, 1796, and in the Works (vols. 7 and 8 of 1807 ed.). German translation by J. C. Huttner, 1797. Third edition, edited by P. Percival, Madras, 1863.

¹⁶ Life 2.88.

¹⁷ Ibid. 140 if.

¹⁸ ‘A digest of Hindu law, on contracts and successions, with a commentary by Jagannatha Terkapanchanana,’ Calcutta, 1797-8. The English translation from the Sanskrit was by H. T. Colebrooke (see his Life, London, 1873 : 74 ff.), who had no very high opinion of the work. Apparently the choice of a Hindu compiler and commentator was not fortunate. Yet, according to evidence presented by Colebrooke’s son and biographer, it proved useful to jurists in India.

¹⁹ ‘The laws of Manu :’ Sacred Books of the East, vol. 25 ; Oxford, 1886. See p. cxviii.

²⁰ ‘On the musical modes of the Hindus,’ As. Res. 3.55-87 ; German transi. F. H. v. Dalberg, 1802 ; reprinted in Ethel Rosenthal, ‘ The story of Indian music,’ London [1929],

²¹ ‘On the Indian game of chess,’ As. Res. 2.159-165; reprinted in Aungervyle Society Reprints, 2d series, Edinburgh, 1883. He had been a chessplayer since boyhood : Life 1.38.

²² ‘On the chronology of the Hindus,’ As. Res. 2.111-147, and (supplement to this) 389-403.

²³ ‘On the antiquity of the Indian zodiack,’ As. Res. 2.289-306 (contains much information which was new to Europeans at the time, but erroneously argues that the zodiac originated independently in India ; p. 296, describes for the first time in a western language the Hindu symbolic way of referring to numerals, as ‘ teeth ‘ = 32, etc.); ‘ The lunar year of the Hindus,’ id. 3.257-293.

²⁴ Life 2.296 ; abbreviated from As. Res. 4.192, where it is said that he began this study ‘ under the confinement of a severe and lingering disorder, which with most minds, would have proved a disqualification from any application.’ This refers to the summer of 1784, when he suffered severely from an unspecified but persistent malady (perhaps some sort of dysentery; but his death in 1794 was attributed to inflammation of the liver, ‘ a complaint common in Bengal,’ Life 2.260). While unable to leave his bed he had brought to him as many local plants as possible and studied them with the aid of Linnaeus (Life 2.44-5). But about 1761, while still a boy at Harrow, he had ‘ amused himself with the study of botany, and in collecting fossils ‘ (Life 1.50).

²⁵ As. Res. 4.355-7 (just after Jones’s death). Jones himself had written of the ašoka (As. Res. 4.275) : ‘ The vegetable world scarce exhibits a richer sight than an Ašoca tree in full bloom ;’ an opinion generally shared by those who have seen it. In As. Res. 2.345-352 he printed a ‘ Design of a treatise on the plants of India,’ with sample descriptions of a few plants ; ibidem 2.405-417 ‘ On the spikenard of the ancients ‘ (supplemented by ‘ Additional Remarks ‘ ib. 4.109-118, and by Roxburgh ib. 4.433-6); and posthumously, ib. 4.229-236 ‘A catalogue of Indian plants, comprehending their Sanscrit and as many of their Linnaean generic names as could with any degree of precision be ascertained ‘ (list of 419 plants); 237-312 ‘ Botanical observations on select Indian plants ‘ (descriptions of 78 plants).

I cannot resist the temptation to quote the following quaint titbit from Teignmouth’s Life, 2.297 : ‘ On the indelicacy of the Linnaean definitions, he observes : “ Hence it is that no well-born and well-educated woman can be advised to amuse herself with botany, as it is now explained, though a more elegant and delightful study, or more likely to assist and embellish other female accomplishments, could not possibly be recommended.”‘

²⁶ Life 2.264. Jones was aided in acquiring languages by a remarkable memory. At the age of twelve, he is said (Life 1.30) to have written out from memory the text of Shakespeare’s Tempest, for use by himself and his fellow- Harrovians in producing the play (which, for some mysterious reason,’ was not readily to be procured ‘). As a further aid to his studies, he had the habit of ‘ regular allotment of his time to particular occupations, and a scrupulous adherence to the distribution which he had fixed ‘ (Life 2.299). A sample program for the long vacation of 1785, as he made it out, is printed in the Life 2.29-30 (note) : ‘ Morning—one letter. Ten chapters of the Bible. Sanscrit Grammar. Hindu Law, etc. Afternoon—Indian Geography. Evening—Roman History. Chess [i.e., I presume, scholarly and historical study of it, cf. note 21 above ; not playing the game]. Ariosto.’—He regularly rose at or before dawn. ‘ By rising before the sun, I allot an hour every day to Sanscrit’ (Life 2.107 ; written in Calcutta, in November, 1786, evidently when his mornings were occupied with business).

²⁷ Published in his article ‘ On the second classical book of the Chinese,’ As. Res. 2.195-203, with the original text of one of them, apparently written by himself. The translation is considered competent by good judges, and the Chinese characters are written creditably tho not perfectly.

²⁸ E.g. ‘ On the gods of Greece, Italy, and India,’ As. Res. 1.221-275 ; ‘ On the origin and families of nations,’ id. 3.479-492.

²⁹ ‘On the philosophy of the Asiaticks,’ As. Res. 4.165-180.

³⁰ ‘On the philosophy of the Asiaticks,’ As. Res. 4.165-180.

³¹ E.g. : ‘Ein unermüdlich coquettirender Schönreder,’ H. Oldenberg, ‘ Aus Indien und Iran,’ 1899, cited by La Vallée-Poussin, Indo-européens et Indo-iraniens, Paris, 1924, p. 2, n. 1.

³² As. Res. 4.169.

³³ Life 1.378. He was apparently on very friendly terms with Benjamin Franklin (under date of March 17, 1783 ; Life 1.405-7) addresses him as ‘Dear friend,’ and subscribes ‘Your affectionate friend, and most obedient servant.’

³⁴ Life 1.392; italics in the original.

³⁵ W. Burroughs to Lord Charlemont : Historical Manuscripts Commission, 13th Report, Appendix 8, p. 178. In the same letter, p. 177 :’Sir William Jones ... is really a most excellent man, and deserves the distinction he has obtained ... he is ... of the purest and most incorruptible honor. ‘This writer had a very low opinion of the other judges of the Calcutta court. In another letter (ibidem p. Ill), dated December 8, 1789, he wrote to Charlemont: ‘Sir William Jones ... is the only judge here whose integrity is not unreservedly questioned. His brethren are as publicly acused [sic] as are some [judges] in Ireland, and are, I believe . . . but very puny lawyers indeed.’—On January 27, 1783, Jones wrote to Lloyd Kenyon a letter asking aid in persuading the Lord Chancellor to appoint him to the Calcutta judgeship, in which he said : ‘As to my politics, which [the Chancellor] has heard much misrepresented, his Lordship may be assured that I am no more a republican than a Mahomedan ora Gentoo. ‘There is, however, evidence that he sometimes expressed himself, perhaps with exaggeration due to momentary enthusiasm, in ways which lent some color to the charge of ‘republicanism.’ At least he saw dangers in the royal authority.

³⁶ Life 1.334-5.

³⁷ AS. Res. 4.193.

³⁸ Life 2.306-7.

³⁹ His modesty is independently vouched for by various writers. "No writer perhaps ever dispIayed so much learning, with so little affectation of it,’ says Teignmouth again (Life 2.277). Dr. Barnard, in his celebrated verses assigning an educative or edifying function to every prominent member of the Literary Club of which Samuel Johnson was the leading spirit, wrote of him :

‘Jones teach me modesty-and Greek.’

(Boswell’s Johnson, ed. G. B. Hill, 4.433). Miss Reynolds reports that ‘he (Johnson) pronounced one day at my house a most lofty panegyric upon Jones the Orientalist, who seemed little pleased with the praise, for what cause I know not.’ (G. B. Hill, ‘Johnsonian Miscellanies,’ 1.287.) In a footnote the editor attributes it to Jones’s modesty.

⁴⁰ AS. Res. 4.194.

⁴¹ Life 2.31 1.

Sir William Jones¹

Suniti Kumar Chatterji

The gifts of the spirit rise superior to all other gifts : dhamma-dānam sabba-dānam jināti—so said Buddha. Poets and Philosophers, Prophets and Seers, Inspired Men of Religion and Leaders of Thought, Discoverers and Teachers of New Truths—such persons are entitled to the respect and homage of men more than those whose achievements and services have been on the material plane only ; and Mankind has given divine or almost divine honours to such men, wherever their spiritual gifts are a living force in the lives as well as the affairs of men, as individuals and as members of Society. The really great in the history of the world are the men of ideas and of intellectual and spiritual achievement, whose lights have never grown dim, or whose lamps have been lit up afresh through the solicitude of earnest and enquiring spirits of the present day : poets and thinkers, and sages and saints like Akhen-aton, Vyāsa, Vālmīki, Homer, Moses, Isaiah, Lao-tzŭ, Buddha, Confucius, Aeschylus, Socrates, Plato, Euripides, Aristotle, Christ, Māni, Mānikka-vācakar, Kālidāsa, Muhammad, Firdausī, Jalāluddin Rūmī, Kabir, Nānak, Tulasīdāsa, Shakespeare, Goethe and the rest. Men of action and men of science on the physical side are remembered not for what they performed in the domain of the ephemeral, but for what contributions they were enabled to make to the spiritual inheritance of man, in advancing it or enlarging it. Alexander of Macedón is great not so much because of his military successes and his spectacular victories as for his being the conscious agent in bringing the two halves of the civilized world of his day together, making each benefit from the spiritual and intellectual stores of the other, and for leaving to humanity the inheritance of the romance of his life. Akbar is one of the greatest of kings mainly because he wanted to realize in his own life and in that of his subjects the ideal of Şulh-i-kull, of fellowship with all. As a man of action Abraham Lincoln was great, but his place in the hall of heroes is due more to his having been a propagator of the idea of freedom for all irrespective of colour or creed, and of democracy. So in a similar way, when we look at the contact between two peoples, the measure of the benefit accruing to the one from the other is to be, not merely material advancement, but an all-round mental and spiritual improvement, manifested in an enlargement of vision, in a reasoned and a just code of conduct, and in a full play of the intellect, with opportunities to live a full life. After nearly two centuries of intimate association between England and India, it is time that we took a dispassionate stock of what one has received from the other, and then decide how one has benefited from the other. In this work of appraisement, the points of view of India and England, from the very nature of the case that the one is the governed and the other the governing state, are bound to differ. Things which the English ruling class would consider as benefits conferred by it on India may not have that importance in the eyes of Indians ; and both the English and the Indians may still have to discover in what direction their mutual contact has been of real benefit or help to either.

To my mind, as that of an Indian who considers the personality and the achievement of Sir William Jones as forming a gift of the premier rank which Europe made to India through England, the greatest benefit that we in India have received from England and Europe is to be able to know ourselves. As an old people, worried and wearied by our domestic trials and tribulations, we had for some centuries gone to sleep, so far as matters both mundane and intellectual were concerned ; and in that sleep we had lost the real knowledge of ourselves, our doings, our relations with our neighbours, and our duties to ourselves. We had nothing but some shreds of our past memories, some dim recollections of what we were and what we did, which a few of us sought with but a hesitating hand to glean from our traditions and our literature ; and we had not yet learned to draw out anything from the vestiges of our civilization which fortunately were still with us, as an inheritance the value of which we had no idea. Through a concatenation of circumstances, political subjection came to deprive us of mental alertness and curiosity ; and we had largely come down to the tragic position of a race advancing fast towards complete degeneracy and intellectual bankruptcy, through an ignorant denial to itself of its own inheritance, combined with a want of capacity to put that inheritance to use by extending it and improving it through contact with outsiders who were better situated than ourselves, vigilant, progressive and puissant. It was at this moment that the eternal mind of ancient Hellas, clad in the toga of imperial Rome, and allying itself with the spirit of eighteenth-century Europe, came to our country in the personality of a thought-leader and a constructive worker like Sir William Jones, and acted as the golden wand that slowly made us shake off the sleep of ages. Modern Europe had taught itself to take a detached and a scientific interest in Man as well as Nature through its coming under the influence of Greece—it had developed both scientific curiosity and a spirit of enquiry in a way which was latterly unknown in India. For the health of its own soul, so to say, Europe wanted to know everything—to exploit all that lay within the range of the intellect. This curiosity and spirit of enquiry, this intellectual urge of Europe was contagious, and it was transmitted as a matter of course to the people of India ; and for the latter also it became a great mental tonic and a spiritual force, to awaken, to rejuvenate and to bring back a sense of self-respect that seemed to be on the way to be engulfed in the meshes of ignorance and of an unreasonable and ignorant orthodoxy that was own cousin to insensate bigotry. This awakening was not long in coming : in the next generation to Sir William Jones’s in India, we have, as the symbols of an Indian cultural renaissance, such diversified personalities as those of Raja Ram Mohun Roy and Raja Radhacant Dev, who, in their different ways, sought to bring back to their people a just and proper knowledge of their past and to make them conscious of their great heritage, and they succeeded in their mission in a most remarkable way.

The tenor of life that was established for some centuries in Western Europe by the Roman empire was disturbed through the rise of the Arab and Turki empires ; and the flow of spices and luxury articles from the East by the land-routes became arrested. These articles formed the objects of international trade, which had made some of the peoples of Mediterranean Europe rich, rich to the extent of making their neighbours in Western Europe jealous ; and attempts to find out sea-routes to India and beyond as the sources of most of these articles led to the discovery of America on the one hand and of South Africa, India, Malaya and the Islands, China and Japan on the other, by the Spaniards and the Portuguese, who were soon followed by the English, the Dutch, the French, the Danes and the Germans, as more or less strong rivals in the domains of exploration, exploitation and commerce. As a result of these discoveries, there followed three stirring and romantic centuries of commercial and colonial exploitation of the material wealth—of the industrial products and the natural resources—of the Americans, and of Africa and Asia, from 1500 A.D. onwards. In this process of exploitation, assisted by other economic and cultural causes, the settlement of America by the Spaniards, the Portuguese, the Dutch, the English and the French started ; and Mexico and Peru with their ancient civilizations were ruthlessly sacrificed at the altar of the intolerant creed of an insatiable race of exploiters. The disorganized and carefree Indonesians, and the disunited and unthinking Indians largely acquiesced in groups of militant merchant-exploiters becoming ultimately their rulers and arbiters of their destiny. Only the organization of China as a huge, centralized and fairly strong empire, and the self-preservative isolation of Japan, saved them from the fate of India, Indo-China and Java. While the material exploitation of the advanced peoples of Asia—Persia, India and China—through commerce, colonization and empire-building was going on, the mind of Europe was awakened early in the eighteenth century, and felt a new interest—if only as a romantic novelty at first—in the strange and distant peoples of the East. This romantic glamour and interest gave place to a proper intellectual or scientific curiosity, through a late resurgence of the Greek spirit which now began to shake off the atmosphere of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The romantic world of Shakespeare, Spenser, Tasso, Ariosto and Camoens and a sort of abandon in Greek scholarship of the fifteenth and sixteenth century humanists now gave place to the encyclopaedists and classicists of the eighteenth century. Scientific and oriental coteries and societies began to be started everywhere for the study of both Nature and Man—in Russia (under German inspiration, when Empress Catherine started the Moscow Academy of Arts and Sciences), in Austria, in Germany, in France, in England and in Italy. Travellers to the East began to interest themselves in the history and civilization of the peoples they visited, and to collect MSS. and art objects from the Muslim Near East, from India, from Indo-China, from Indonesia, and from China and Japan.

Among those rare spirits in Europe during the second half of the eighteenth century who, nurtured as they were in the humanism of ancient Greece and Rome, felt irresistibly drawn towards the culture and religion and the languages and literatures of the East, was Sir William Jones. And it is very largely to his credit that an instinctive urge was brought within the purview of a reasoned endeavour—a vague and but imperfectly understood and a wistful desire to know more about the Eastern peoples and to speculate about them was transformed by him into a conscious spirit of enquiry and systematized research. He was not a pioneer in this field of scholarly work : six years before he started the Asiatic Society in Bengal, some Dutch scholars, resident in Batavia in Java, had already established their Association of the Arts and Sciences. But no one seems to have understood more penetratingly the implications of this new line of enquiry, into the history and civilization of the peoples of Asia in which the mind of Europe began to busy itself for the first time. Sir William Jones opened up for civilized Europe a new chapter in the Science of Man—that of Orientalism : and the participation of Eastern scholars with those of Europe, which Sir William Jones had envisaged from the very beginning, has formed a brilliant and a significant episode in the history of intellectual co-operation, and has given a new orientation to itself, transforming it to a thing of national and not merely academical interest for the peoples of the Near East, of India, Indo-China and Indonesia, and of the Far East.

Thus in the extension of the horizon of Europe from the purely material to the intellectual, in matters concerning the East, Sir William Jones took a leading part. Of course, his contemporaries were also there : the Arabists of Europe, the Jesuits in China who mastered Chinese—sometimes men of vast erudition but generally of a singularly orthodox or narrow outlook ; and there were the scholarly pioneers, like Estevão (or Stephen) in Konkani, Beschi in Tamil, Anquetil du Perron (so much misunderstood even by Sir William Jones) in Avestan, Manoel da Assumpçaõ and Nathaniel Brassey Halhed in Bengali, and Charles Wilkins in Sanskrit. After that, a select group felt attracted by the deeper spiritual experiences of India and China, and of Sufiistic Islam—subjects which appear to be slowly but inevitably drawing thinking people all over the world, the translators and the specialists having done the preliminary spadework in giving rise to the present interest. The appeal to the aesthetic sense of Europe from the art of Japan, China and India came last, from the fourth quarter of the last century : and the fine art of India and the Far East are now established on pedestals of equality with the art of Greece, at least as equally great and elevating, and significant expressions of man’s aesthetic faculty—although along lines which are in some cases different from the aesthetic expression of classical Greece. The discovery of the greatness of Eastern Art is now going hand in hand with a renewed study and appreciation of Eastern—Persian, Indian and Chinese—thought and mysticism : and we are thus in the midst of a fourth phase in the study and appréciation of the thought and culture of the East in the modern world.

Sir William Jones was not only an incarnation of the intellectual curiosity of the highly cultivated and humanistic eighteenth century Europe—he was something more : his work has meant more for us Indians than what he himself or any compatriot of his was conscious of. Like all leaders of men in the domain of thought, his was in the first instance the soul of a Poet. He had, of course, composed a number of original poems in the characteristic style of eighteenth century English classicism, and in a few of these he had sought to celebrate Hindu deities and Hindu legends in the approved classical style, although the subject matter was quite novel in European literature of the time : but these are mere exercises—they do not form the proper index of Sir William Jones as a man of imagination who could see visions and dream dreams. It is rather in the wide sweep with which he took in the achievements of Man in the East, as the complement to what he was familiar with in connexion with Man in the West—in his attempt to appraise in themselves and in their mutual connexions the cultures of the various peoples of Asia, the Indians, the Arabs, the Persians, the Tartars, the Chinese, and the Peoples of the Islands of the South-East and Highlands of Central Asia—that his poetic vision comes in. His vision transcended the age in which he lived ; and in some cases it penetrated the gloom which still covered the history of the origin and development of Asiatic and European peoples. When he took up Eastern classics for translation, for the pure pleasure of it, he selected two masterpieces of Arabic and Sanskrit literature—the Mu’aUaqăt al-Saba ‘or’ ‘the Seven Suspended Poems’ of pre-Islamic Arabic literature, where we find the spirit of the desert Arabs at its earliest and most characteristic form, and the drama Sakuntalã of Kãlidãsa, one of the most exquisite creations of literature which has become a classic for the whole of humanity, and which was hailed with acclamation by no less a personality than Goethe himself, Jones’s great contemporary, who also like him was a believer in the oneness of all human culture. Jones imbibed from his European inheritance the Greco-Roman idea of Humanity : a divine instinct in him filled him with a fervent Friendship for All, an ideal which is both of the Indian thinker and the Iranian mystic, as expressed by them respectively through the Sanskrit term Visva-mâitrî and the Perso-Arabic phrase Şulh-i-kull. Jones was nevertheless the man of his age and the representative of his own people. As in the case of most great men, he was both national and international at the same time. He thought that ‘reason and taste’ were ‘the grand prerogatives of the European minds, while the Asiatics have soared to loftier heights in the sphere of imagination’. With him, born and brought up in an ‘age of reason’, there was undoubtedly a tacit feeling that reason and the intellect were superior to emotion and the imagination. The advance which Europe had made over Asia in most of the Sciences and in the application of Science to life was manifest. He had thus—and it was but natural—a sense of the cultural superiority of the European over Asiatic, African and American peoples. And yet he spoke publicly against ‘the abominable traffic in the human species the Negro slave-trade, from which a part of his countrymen dared ‘to derive their most inauspicious wealth’. Slavery was to him the violation of a primary law of nature, and it meant ‘the robbing a human creature of those eternal rights, of which no law upon earth can justly deprive him’. Sir William Jones’s biographer has made the following observation which is worth quoting in this context : ‘It was a favourite opinion of Sir William Jones that all men are born with an equal capacity for improvement ‘; and his biographer then hastens to give his own view that he does not himself admit this opinion of Jones. (The Works of Sir William Jones, with the Life of the Author, by Lord Teignmouth, Vol. II, London, 1807, p. 299 foot-note.)

In Sir William Jones, the ideal of the English Gentleman, which took its final shape, so to say, in the eighteenth century, found its highest expression on the intellectual side. He was but moderately philosophical. In spite of his inner being earnestly seeking from God the divine gift of Wisdom (as we learn from an intimate little prayer composed by himself), he was rooted strongly enough in the conventional and generally accepted dogmas of Christianity to obtain the approval of his biographer Lord Teignmouth (Sir John Shore), an ardent Christian who became a great patron of the British and Foreign Bible Society. We can ignore the occasional expressions of contempt, betraying but his misunderstanding or ignorance, which he has used with regard to religions other than the one he professed : for these were but a current fashion of speech in his language and its style, saturated as they were with the spirit of orthodox Christianity, and these did not express his deepest convictions or predilections as a scholar and a sympathetic student who had imagination and culture enough not to remain unmoved by the great thoughts and ideas he found in other religions. In India, where he was so eager to come, not to shake the pagoda tree and return home as a Nabob, but to enlarge the world of human knowledge by systematically finding out the history of both Man and Nature in Asia, he could not but help feeling what he really was—a member of the ruling race, superior in intelligence, in knowledge, in discipline, and in organization. But this was tempered, as we can see from his writings, with such a sincere desire to know more about the people with a view to be of help to them better, that the alien administrator was lost in the sympathetic friend and the disinterested lover of knowledge. He proclaimed his ideal in the peroration to his Ninth Anniversary Discourse before the Asiatic Society of Bengal delivered in February, 1792 : ‘The race of man, to advance whose manly happiness is our duty and will of course be our endeavour, cannot long be happy without virtue, nor actively virtuous without freedom, nor securely free without rational knowledge’. It was a desire to apply this rational knowledge to the study of themselves that Sir William Jones helped to instil in his Indian fellow-beings, in a spirit of kindliness and friendship. In a fit of religious fervour, which one would suspect is rather conventional and formal, he speaks of the Hindus in this strain : ‘They err, yet feel, though Pagans, they are men.’

Sir William Jones sought to use this rational knowledge, which was his special European heritage as he profoundly believed and as it unquestionably was, in the study of the languages, literatures and civilizations of Asia. To this rational knowledge were added an urbanity and a desire to understand and appreciate, which are the marks of true culture. It requires a great man to appreciate something great ; he studied, he understood, he admired. He was the first link between the old that was India, and the new that was Europe. Like all great spirits he saw Unity in the midst of Diversity : and he stressed that Unity. So that, in spite of his having belonged to a totally different world, this Christian gentleman, this cultured son of England with the best that her public schools and her universities could give, with all the hesitating steps and the mystic intuitions of the first explorer, was able to draw out some of the noblest and most abiding things in our Eastern civilization, and to inspire others from among his own countrymen, and, later on, from amongst ourselves, Indians, too, to do the same. And in this way, he put heart in us Indians—indirectly, if not directly : and he perhaps unconsciously, supplied one of the strongest forces for a revival, a renaissance, of our national culture in India—the force of rational knowledge, of intelligent understanding through proper study. It is in this way that the following line in a poem composed in honour of Sir William Jones after his death by the Duchess of Devonshire is true : ‘The prostrate Hindu own’d his fostering hand.’

The life of Sir William Jones, as that of a scholar and humanist, is lacking in anything sensational, but a perusal of it is an intellectual pleasure, as is that of a number of his letters, and of some of his discourses, which have a permanent value in tracing the history of the Science of Man. Sir William Jones was born in London on September 20, 1746, and he died in Calcutta on April 27, 1794, before he could complete his 48th year. He was in India for not even full 11 years, and yet he has left his mark on Indian Science and Indian Letters, and has been an unseen force in the intellectual and even spiritual regeneration of the people of India. Some great qualities he would appear to have inherited from both his father and mother. His father was Welsh, of yeoman stock, who came to London from Anglesey, and became a well-known mathematician who was a friend of Halley and Newton. His mother was the daughter of a London cabinet-maker, and she was a remarkable woman who helped to build up her son’s mind and character : she will live in the memories of men for her words to urge her son in his studies—‘Read, and you will know’. Young Jones, with what his father left him, got the best education which the scion of an intellectual father could receive in eighteenth-century England. He passed through Harrow and Oxford, and graduated in 1768 ; and he became M.A. in 1773, after serving for some time as tutor to a young nobleman, Lord Althorp, with whom he travelled to Germany and in France and Italy. He became a finished Latin and Greek scholar : he learned French, German, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese. Like typical University men in eighteenth-century Europe, he could compose verses in Latin and Greek, and could carry on correspondence with ease in Latin : his Latin correspondence with the Polish scholar Reviczki, with the Dutch Arabist Schultens, with the Spaniard Bayer, and with some of his own countrymen like Hunt, Halhed and Orme, has been partially preserved. While still at Oxford, he studied Hebrew and learned Persian and Arabic thoroughly, employing an Arab speaker from Aleppo who happened to be in England then to teach him Arabic pronunciation ; and he acquired some knowledge of Turkish also. At the repeated request of King Christian VII of Denmark, he translated into French a Persian biography of Nadir Shah, the MS. of which was in the possession of the king, in 1770, when he was only 24 years old. Before that, when he was only 22, he had begun, in Latin, a fairly large work on Oriental (i.e. Arabic, Persian and Turkish) Poetry, which he subsequently published in 1774 ; a work which considerably increased his reputation, both in England and on the continent. His Persian Grammar, an exceedingly well-written work, he brought out in 1771. Recognition for his linguistic attainments came to him from Government in 1772, when he was made a Fellow of the Royal Society. He consorted with the intellectual élite of England who had gathered round Dr. Samuel Johnson, and he was an intimate of both Burke and Gibbon. Although he was anxious to spend his life in studying the ancient as well as eastern history, literature and culture (his translation of the Orations of Isaeus from the Greek appeared in 1778), he thought he should take up law for a living, and with this end in view he joined the Middle Temple in 1770, and was finally called to the Bar in 1774. In 1776 he was appointed Commissioner of Bankrupts, and in 1781 he brought out his Essay on Bailments, which became a classic in the subject, being frequently reprinted in England and America. In connexion with his work as lawyer, he was to have gone to America on behalf of a client, and he even went to France in 1782 from where he was to sail to the new world ; but Fate decided otherwise.

We find him eager to go out to India, only in order to have greater opportunities for study and research into the cultures and literatures of eastern peoples. His Arabic and other oriental studies he did not neglect, and in 1783 he published his English translation of the Seven Mu’allaqät, giving the original Arabic text in a Roman transliteration—a work of first-rate importance for the study of Arabic which he had completed in 1780-81. In March 1783, Jones obtained his much-coveted appointment to a judgeship of the Supreme Court of Judicature in Calcutta. He was knighted at the same time. In April 1783 he married the eldest daughter of the Bishop of St. Asaph (a lady who proved a very devoted wife to him, having brought out a sumptuous edition in 6 big volumes of the complete works of her husband as the best tribute to his memory two years after his demise), and set sail for India in the same month, arriving in Calcutta in September 1783. He joined his official duties in December 1783, and in January 1784, with the collaboration of a few Englishmen like Charles Wilkins, the first Englishman and one of the first Europeans to study Sanskrit, he founded the Asiatic Society, later known, in 1839, as the Asiatic Society of Bengal, in the presence of about 30 distinguished British people resident in Calcutta.

The Inaugural Address he delivered on the occasion of the founding of the Society is a document of permanent value for its imagination and its vision, and forms a declaration of ideals which can never be antiquated. The opening paragraph is well worth quoting :

When I was at sea last August, on my voyage to this country, which I had long and ardently desired to visit, I found one evening, on inspecting the observations of the day, that India lay before us, and Persia on our left, whilst a breeze from Arabia blew nearly on our stern. A situation so pleasing in itself, and to me so new, could not fail to awaken a train of reflections in a mind, which had early been accustomed to contemplate with delight the eventful histories and agreeable fictions of this eastern world. It gave me inexpressible pleasure to find myself in the midst of so noble an amphitheatre, almost encircled by the vast regions of Asia, which has ever been esteemed the nurse of sciences, the inventress of delightful and useful arts, the scene of glorious actions, fertile in the production of human genius, abounding in natural wonders, and infinitely diversified in the forms of religion and government, in the laws, manners, customs, and languages, as well as in the features and complexions, of men. I could not help remarking, how important and extensive a field was yet unexplored, and how many solid advantages unimproved, and when I considered, with pain, that, in this fluctuating imperfect, and limited conditions of life, such inquiries and improvements could only be made through the united efforts of many, who are not easily brought, without some pressing inducement or strong impulse, to converge in a common point, I consoled myself with a hope, founded on opinions, which it might have the appearance of flattery to mention, that, if in any country or community, such an union could be effected, it was among my countrymen in Bengal, with some of whom I already had, and with most desirous of having, the pleasure of being intimately acquainted.

He laid down the scope of the investigations proposed to be taken up by the Society in this address : it was to be ‘Man and Nature : whatever is performed by the one, or produced by the other within the geographical limits of Asia. Up to his death, for ten years successively Jones took a leading part in the investigations of the Society, and he contributed a number of papers—on the transliteration of the Eastern languages (including Sanskrit) into Roman, on the Gods of Greece, Italy and India, on the Chronology of the Hindus, on the Musical Modes of the Hindus, on the Antiquity of the Hindu Zodiac, on the Literature of the Hindus from the Sanskrit, on the Indian Game of Chess, and on other topics. Most of these papers supplied mental pabulum to the people of India also, and were translated or adapted into Bengali and other Indian languages. He also communicated papers on Zoology, Botany and Medicine, sciences which he had taken up himself for serious study. As President of the Asiatic Society in Calcutta, his ten Annual Discourses given every year from 1785 to 1794 in the month of February, made a survey of all that was then known and all that he could reasonably speculate about the History and Civilization of Asia in general (1785), and on those of individual peoples—the Hindus (1786), the Arabs (1787), the Tartars (1788), the Persians (1789), the Chinese (1790), and ‘the Borderers, Mountaineers and Islanders of Asia’ (1791) ; and the subsequent annual addresses were on the Origin and Families of Nations (1792), on Asiatic History, civil and natural (1793), and on the Philosophy of the Asiatics (1794). In the last he quotes with approval the following translation made by himself from the Sanskrit of the Upanishad :

That spirit, from which these created beings proceed;
through which, having proceeded from it, they live;
toward which they tend, and in which they are ultimately absorbed:
—that Spirit study to know : that Spirit is the Great One.

Yatō vā imāni bhütāni jâyantë,
уёпа jātāni jivanti,
yat pra-yanti, abhi-sam-visanti,
—tad vi-jijnāsasva : tad brahma. (Tăittirîya Upanişad.)

Subsequent accession of facts has made antiquated a good deal of the views expressed by Sir William Jones in the above and other contributions of his, but certain things of abiding worth he has bestowed upon the world. Soon after his arrival in India, he took to Sanskrit studies with all seriousness ; and a mind, nurtured in the classical tongues of Europe, Latin and Greek, and in Arabic and Persian which he had also made his own while in England, found a veritable mine of precious stones in Sanskrit. He was a finished Arabist and Iranist before leaving the shores of England : he became the foremost Sanskrit scholar among Europeans within a few years after his arrival in India. Before Sir William Jones, here and there an occasional missionary from among the Roman Catholic orders who had obtained the patronage and support of the Portuguese in India made a tentative acquaintance with Sanskrit, from the early part of the eighteenth century : and a Jesuit Missionary of Bohemian or Czech nationality was actually impressed by the close agreement between Sanskrit and Latin. Warren Hastings, for administrative purposes, patronized the study of Hindu law, and had a digest of the Hindu codes regarding inheritance prepared by a band of Pandits appointed in Calcutta for the purpose. But there was no one to translate this digest, the Vivãdãrnava-sêtu, directly from the Sanskrit into English. It was rendered first into Persian by Bengali munshis, and then the Persian version was translated into English by Nathaniel Brassey Halhed, and the English was published in 1776 as a Code of Gentoo Law. Charles Wilkins, later knighted (1749 7-1839), who had entered the East India Company’s service in 1770, and who assisted in establishing a printing press for oriental languages in Bengal in 1778 (Wilkins is to be gratefully remembered by the people of Bengal for having prepared and cut the first Bengali fount with the help of a Bengali blacksmith named Panchänan Karmakär to print Halhed’s Bengali Grammar in 1778, the first book using Bengali type) was sent by Warren Hastings to study Sanskrit in Benares. (Sir William Jones was enabled to accomplish his cherished desire to see Benares at least once, but he could not make a prolonged stay there as he felt that his knowledge of Sanskrit was not as yet advanced enough to enable him to profit by his contact with the Sanskrit scholars there.) Wilkins became quite proficient in Sanskrit, and he translated the Bhagavad-Gltã (published 1785)—the first Sanskrit work to be rendered directly from Sanskrit into a European language ; and it is pleasing to think that there was something providential in the selection of this great philosophico-religious text of India as the first work to be presented to the West in a European version directly from Sanskrit ; after which the publication of a Latin translation by Anquetil du Perron of the Persian version of the Upanishads made under the patronage of Prince Dãrã Shikōh came out from Paris in 1801-1802. Wilkins followed this by his English rendering of the Hitôpadësa in 1787 and of the Sakuntalã episode of the Mahãbhãrata in 1795 : and in 1808 he published from England his Sanskrit Grammar, in which Nãgari letters were first used in a book printed in England.

Wilkins was joined in his great work by Sir William Jones. On February 2, 1786, in his Third Annual Discourse before the Asiatic Society, his subject being the History and Culture of the Hindus, he formally announced, so to say, to the European world, the great fact of Sanskrit being in India as the repository of Indian literature and civilization, and the fact of its being closely related to Greek and Latin. The following pronouncement, which has been frequently quoted in books on Linguistics, was epoch-making :

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, both in the roots of verbs and in the forms of grammar, 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 a common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists ; there is a similar reason, though not quite so forcible, for supposing that both the Gothick and the Celtick, though blended with a very different idiom, had the same origin with the Sanscrit ; and the old Persian might be added to the same family.

The above lines form in a way the basis for Modern Scientific Linguistics as it has been evolving through the attempts of five generations of ‘linguisticians ‘to explain the agreements among the members of a connected group or family of languages and to call into being the elusive ‘common source’ of the family ‘which no longer exists’. One may well say that the nature of linguistic development envisaged by the above sentences appeared in the mind of Sir William Jones with the flash of a prophetic inspiration. The science of Linguistics on the descriptive and analytic side had its birth in the grammatical descriptions and investigations, explanations and speculations of the Vedic scholars of ancient India who busied themselves with the language of the Vedic texts. But the work of the Indian grammarians was imperfect in this, that language was conceived by them to be a static phenomenon. Among the Greek philosophers, the dynamic and ever-changing character of human speech came to be understood by 300 B.C., but Greek grammar did not possess that superb analysis and wealth of detail which have made Sanskrit grammar one of the foremost achievements of the human intellect. The genetic and historical development of speech was not yet understood : and Sir William Jones’ brilliant suggestion put linguistic scholars on the right track of conceiving human speech to be groupable in families, members of which were derived from a common archetype. A new human science, that of Comparative Philology, or Linguistics, with its numerous ramifications linking it up with other sciences both human and physical, came into being, as the immediate result, so to say, of this inspired statement of Sir William Jones. The way was prepared for linguistic Palaeontology, Anthropology and Ethnology, Phonetics, descriptive, historical as well as experimental (the last being in close touch with Physics and Mathematics and partly with Physiology), Speech Psychology, Comparative Mythology and Religiology, and the rest. Present-day ‘linguisticians ‘have to begin their survey of the development of their sciences with homage to the memory of Sir William Jones as a path-finder—a pathi-krt, to use the Vedic term ; and votaries of a number of other sciences would also do the same, if the ultimate inspiration of their sciences were sedulously traced.

The Asiatic Society as founded by Sir William Jones was responsible for creating an interest in the culture and wisdom of the East, all over Europe, and in a way it may be described as the real mother of all orientalistic associations which were started during the first half of the nineteenth century in Europe. An Asiatic Academy was first inaugurated in Russia in 1810 at St. Petersburg, and the founders of it declared that—

In the last years of the eighteenth century there has been a transformation in the attitude to human civilization ... The accidental reasons for this revaluation are the successes of the British in India, the mastery on the part of German scholars of the sacred language of the Brahmans, the works of Zoroaster and the text of the Bible, and also the foundation of the Asiatic Society at Calcutta.

The Société Asiatique of Paris was founded in 1822, and the British Asiatic Society (the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland) in 1829, which came to have a number of branches in the East ; and we have similar Asiatic Societies in other countries, notably the German Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft (in the forties of the last century). A new epoch and a new orientation in the enlargement of the culture and mind of Modern Man thus began, thanks to the initial inspiration from Sir William Jones.

Sir William Jones, the poet and literary man, and the judge and jurist, did not eclipse himself in the orientalist. His translation of the Sakuntalã of Kãlidãsa (1789) has been one of the most significant services in the cause of international literature. The same may also be said of his translation of the Hitôpadësa, and of the Manusamhitã (1794). Translated into German by Georg Forster in 1791, the Sakuntalã was read with genuine pleasure by Goethe who celebrated it in a beautiful lyric well known in German literature ; and in the Prelude to his great drama of Faust Goethe imitated the convention of the ancient Indian drama of the owner of the theatre and his colleagues carrying on a discourse. Jones was very much impressed by Kälidäsa’s genius, and in some of his original poems in English we see reminiscences of the Indian poet. The Institutes of Menu (Manu), and the translation from the Arabic of the Muslim Law of Succession to Property of Intestates, and of the Sirãjiyyah or the Muslim Law of Inheritance, have their value both in the administration of justice in Indian law courts and in the comparative study of Law. His original poems, and poetical translations from oriental languages, fill quite a respectable volume. He was a genuine bhāva-Śişya or spiritual disciple of Virgil and of the Renaissance poets in the domain of poetry. His projected romantic epic of Britain Discovered, fragments of which he had composed, was to be completed in the orthodox manner in 12 books (the title recalls that of Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered and Milton’s Paradise Lost). Jones had the arguments or contents of these 12 books written out and fully set forth. Here we see a curious medley of classical, medieval and Hindu mythological characters and situations, all sought to be moulded in a classical mould. We may smile at the arguments of the projected second book of his ‘heroic poem ‘of Britain Discovered, in which he wanted to give an account of ‘the Gods of India convened on Mount Cailás, by Rudra or Mahádeva, the power of destruction : their numbers, characters, attributes and attendants : the Goddess Gangá announces the views and voyage of the Tyrian hero, expresses her apprehensions of his ultimate success, but advises the most vehement opposition ; declaring, that his victory will prove the origin of a wonderful nation, who will possess themselves of her banks, profane her waters, mock the temples of the Indian divinities, appropriate the wealth of their adorers, introduce new laws, a new religion, a new government, insult the Brahmens, and disregard the sacred ordinances of Brihmå ‘; etc., etc. But we cannot but admire the man who in a series of Desiderata written out in his own hand (which was found in his papers after his death) had placed before himself the following vast and comprehensive scholarly projects :

DESIDERATA.

INDIA.

1. The Ancient Geography of India, etc., from the Puranas.

2. A Botanical Description of Indian Plants, from the Cóshas, etc.

3. A Grammar of the Sanscrit Language, from Panini, etc.

4. A Dictionary of the Sanscrit Language, from the thirty-two original Vocabularies and Niructi.

5. On the Ancient Music of the Indians.

6. On the Medical Substances of India, and the Indian Art of Medicine.

7. On the Philosophy of the Ancient Indians.

8. A Translation of the Veda.

9. On Ancient Indian Geometry, Astronomy and Algebra.

10. A Translation of the Puranas.

11. Translation of the Mahábhárat and Rámáyan.

12. On the Indian Theatre, etc., etc.

13. On the Indian Constellations, with their Mythology from the Puranas.

14. The History of India before the Muhammadan conquest, from the Sanscrit Kashmir Histories.

ARABIA.

15. The History of Arabia before Mohammed.

16. A Translation of the Hamása.

17. A Translation of Hariri.

18. A Translation of the Fácahatál Khulafá. Of theCáfiah.

PERSIA.

19. The History of Persia, from authorities in Sanskrit, Arabic, Greek, Turkish, Persian, Ancient and Modern.

20. The Five Poems of Nizámi, Translated in Prose.

  A Dictionary of pure Persian—Jahangiri.

CHINA.

21. Translation of the Shi-cing.

22. The text of Con-fu-tsi, verbally translated.

TARTARY.

23. A History of the Tartar Nations, chiefly of the Moguls and Othmans, from the Turkish and Persian.

Such were the vast projects of a pioneer in the field, and they demonstrate the wide sweep of the man’s vision, and of his powers as well. He did not spare himself in preparing for this series of great projects : his premature death at 48 was no doubt hastened by so much continuous and arduous labour. But the light he had kindled with his genius has never grown dim, and it is becoming brighter and brighter with the passing of years, decades and centuries.

We are now met here in the Society which was his creation—his great gift to both Britain and India—to celebrate in all gratitude the 200th anniversary of his birth, a most auspicious event in the history of human fellowship and mutual understanding through Science through what he has called ‘Rational Knowledge’. We are members of a great Republic of Letters, in which creed and colour and politics and pelf have no place : and we have met here today, to offer individually and jointly, our tribute of gratitude and respect to this great man. I have to offer my personal gratitude to him, for it was through his English translation that I had my introduction to a great classic of my own country, when some 48 years ago I was enabled to have a glimpse of Kălidăsa’s immortal creation of Abhijñana- śãkuntalam when I was a student at school ; and for my introduction to the Seven Mu’allaqăt of Arabic literature and my study of the original text of this work I am indebted to him—this rare literary pleasure I revelled in when a student at college some 35 years ago. At this representative gathering of students and scholars, we offer our homage to the memory of a great man to whom it was given to perform a most conspicuous service to his fellow men in making our diverse national inheritances in culture One Great and Common Heritage for all men in all climes : a man who was acclaimed by one of his contemīporaries on the continent as early as 1774, in the words of classical Arabic, as Farïd’aşarihi wa Qarīdahrihi, ‘the Incomparable One of his age, and the Most Profound One of his timeʼ, and who merits fully the compliment paid to him by another contemporary, of his own country— ‘the Most Enlightened of the Sons of Men’.

Source : Suniti Kumar Chatterji, ‘Sir William Jones : 1746-1794,’ in Sir William Jones Bicentenary of his birth commemoration volume 1746-1946 (Calcutta, 1948) pp. 81-96. By permission of the author.

¹ Bicentenary Address delivered on January 7, 1946.

Sir William Jones’s Persian Linguistics

Garland H. Cannon

To the modern lay readers who know of the British Orientalist Sir William Jones (1746-94), he is one of the greatest linguists of all time. By linguist they mean a polyglot rather than a linguistic scientist. Today much of his popular fame in linguistics still rests on the accomplishment that encyclopedias and similar nonscientific sources invariably stress : he knew twenty-eight languages.

Linguists question how many he ‘knewʼ. He had a knowledge of the writing systems, but seldom did he know the languages so represented.¹ On the other hand, they unhesitatingly credit him with his major achievement—postulating the science of comparative linguistics through his famous formulation in 1786 that Sanskrit Latin, Greek, and certain other European languages were divergent forms of an earlier language :

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, both in the roots of verbs and in the forms of grammar, 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, [a record of] no longer exists : there is a similar reason, though not quite so forcible, for supposing that both the Gothick [i.e., Germanic] and the Celtick, though blended with a very different idiom, had the same origin with the Sanscrit ; and the old Persian might be added to the same family.

The observation came at a significant time, when Europeans were just becoming aware of their own identity as separate from the strong Latin-Greek tradition.² So his discovery that Sanskrit and other tongues could give clues to the Western common prehistoric heritage provided a compelling motivation for incisive research in linguistics.

Studies concerned with the development of linguistic scholarship usually contain the philologer’s passage in toto, but after a brief comment on its importance, linguists do not return to Jones. The assumption seems to be that, except for the passage and perhaps his translation of certain Oriental literary works to which he often appended copies in the original language or in his system of Romanalphabet transliteration, the rest of his language scholarship is unimportant. Scholars have not even taken the time to point out the several obvious errors within the philologerʼs passage. The errors are not the focus of this paper, though necessarily they must be considered in any application of modern knowledge to the language study that started him on his illustrious career, what might be called loosely his Persian linguistics. Necessarily, too, the application must be centered upon A Grammar of the Persian Language, one of the most famous grammars of the century. It is hoped that from this paper, in addition to new information as to Jones’s little-known Persian linguistics, there will emerge a clearer understanding of the direction and method of his language research, and that the understanding will provide a richer insight into Jones as perhaps the first modern linguist.

Since he was acclaimed one of the major poets of his age, on a par with Dryden and Pope, it is not surprising to find much of his work with Persian consisting of translations and literary criticisms. These are of little linguistic value. Because his contemporaries were not scholars in any modern sense, although a few were interested in Persian and Arabic, their extensive correspondence with him likewise contains nothing of significance. Jones’s Persian linguistics is to be found in only a handful of writings on Persian matters, of which a kind of calendar might be listed, before that handful is examined:

1. LʼHistoire de Nader Chah (1770).

2. Traité sur la poésie orientale (1770).

3. Dissertation sur la littérature orientale (1771).

4. A Grammar of the Persian Language (1771).

5. ‘ A Persian Song of Hafiz ʼ(1771).

6. Lettre à Monsieur A*** du P*** (1771).

7. ‘An Essay on the Poetry of the Eastern Nations ʼ(1772).

8. ‘An Introduction to the History of the Life of Nader Shah ʼ(1773).

9. ‘The History of the Persian Language ʼ(1773).

10. Poeseos Asiaticœ Commentariorum (1774).

11. The Persian quatrain ‘On Parent Knees ʼ(1785).

12. ‘Tales and Fables by Nizami ʼ(1785).

13. ʻPlan of a Tragedy on the Story of Sohrab ʼ(1786*).

14 Lailí Majnún, a Persian Poem of Hátifí (1788).

15 ‘A Dissertation on the Orthography of Asiatick Words in Roman Lettersʼ (1788).

16 ‘A Song, from the Persian ʼ(1780’s*).

17 ‘An Ode of Jami’ (1780’s*).

18 ‘The Sixth Discourse ; on the Persians ʼ(1790).

19 ‘On the Mystical Poetry of the Persians and Hindus ՚ (1792).³

LʼHistoire de Nader Chah was not the beginning of Jones’s work. He was already a language student with some modern ideas before he ever became interested in Persian. Like other young men at Harrow and Eton, he studied Greek. Unlike most of them, he excelled. One reason was his care for details. Thus he learned to copy the individual Greek characters perfectly, and so conscientiously did he practice imitating Sophoclesʼ poetry, that his teachers praised his compositions as having the qualities of the original Greek. He was as successful with Hebrew. Before he left Harrow for Oxford he had been nicknamed the Great Scholar.

Having been educated in the classical tradition, he believed Greek and Latin to be the most beautiful and perfect languages of all time. Others being inferior, they were primarily valuable for study as a means of gaining the cultural values contained in the writings in those languages, so as to introduce the values into European culture. He said that the immediate object of education is therefore ‘to learn the languages of celebrated nations both ancient and modern.’⁴ Much later he particularized about Arabic and Persian : ‘You may observe, that I have omitted [references to learning] their languages, the diversity and difficulty of which are a sad obstacle to the progress of useful knowledge ; but I have ever considered languages as the mere instruments of real learning, and think them improperly confounded with learning itself : the attainment of them is, however, indispensably necessary.⁵ He was never to view a language as worthy of study per se.

His reference to diversity and difficulty is symptomatic of another unscientific view that he was never to discard : a language could be described meaningfully as beautiful and poetic, or harsh and unliterary ; as rich in sounds and vocabulary (and therefore superior to a language possessing a small vocabulary), or as uneuphonic and lexically inadequate ; or as easy or difficult to learn. European scholars believed that Latin and Greek fitted the positive side ; Oriental languages especially, the negative. Hebrew had introduced Jones to Middle-Eastern literature, which he found rich and fascinating. So in his early literary criticisms he had as one objective the refutation of the charge that Persian is difficult and baroque.

In disposing of this idea, he was not substituting for it the linguistic one. He merely went to the other extreme by arguing that Persian is sonorous, musical, and easy to learn. That he believed such description to be precise and partly technical is indisputable ; however, such terms had a high frequency in popular thought and would be less likely to be misunderstood than what today would be necessitated. An example from ‘An Essay on the Poetry of the Eastern Nations’ will illustrate his argument : ‘This delicacy of their lives and sentiments has insensibly affected their language, and rendered it the softest, as it is one of the richest, in the world….The sweetness of sound cannot be determined by the sight, and many words, which are soft and musical in the mouth of a Persian, may appear harsh to our eyes [when transliterated], with a number of consonants and gutturals.’⁶

On the positive side, the argument suggests his innovational realization of the importance of working with a native informant in learning a foreign language. Such was impossible in the case of the Latin of Virgil or the Greek of Aristotle, but not so with Arabic, which he decided to learn when a fellow-student interested him in the literature buried in that language. Out of his limited funds he employed an informant named Mirza. For an hour or so every morning Mirza orally translated Antoine Galland’s edition of Les mille et une nuits into Arabie, Jones transcribing this rough version and then later polishing it and eliminating forms and constructions which differed from the only standards he had, Thomas Erpenius ʼArabic grammar and Jacobus GoliusʼArabicLatin grammar.⁷ The reliance on authorities is partially excusable because of Jones’s suspicion—and he was right—of substandard qualities in Mirza’s speech.

At the same time that he was gaining a good command of Arabic, he was becoming interested in Persian, partly because of the common writing system and numerous borrowings, and also because of his wish to read Persian literature in the original. At the moment no informant was available, but he relied upon Franciscus Meninski’s famous Thesaurus Linguarum Orientalium Turcicœ, Arabicœ, Persicœ, applying his knowledge to Sadi’s Gulistan, on which he worked exhaustively, assisted by Georgius Gentiusʼ version. He made such progress in reading that he published his Grammar only six years later. In the mid 1760’s, setting out to revise Meninski’s dictionary, he collected from great literature many intended insertions. He eventually dropped the project after the East India Company did not act upon his subtle suggestion that it should agree to pay the total considerable expenses, and after he lost interest in the Turkish and Arabic parts of the dictionary.

News of his facility with Oriental languages was now widespread throughout Europe. He was offered a lucrative governmental post as Interpreter for Eastern Languages. Another request he found himself unable to refuse, and so he reluctantly conceded to Christian VII’s repeated urging that he translate into French the official history of Nadir Shah by Mirza Mahdi, Ta՝rikh-i-Nadiri. The result was L’Histoire de Nader Chah, something of a scholarly exercise in translation. Through it Jones demonstrated an admirable skill in working with Persian writing. On the whole the rendering was excellent, in view of his lack of ‘ponyʼ sources and a modern conversion table for dates.⁸

In 1766 he had extracted from his Persian reading a set of descriptive formulations intended for the use of a friend who was planning to go to India, where a grammar would supposedly be of great help. It was popularly thought that because many Indian princes used Persian in their letters, they also spoke it in day-to-day activities. In 1769 he transcribed these materials for publication, but when he realized how much was being expected of the already known though still unpublished manuscript, he revised on it until 1771. The Grammar was famous overnight.

In the Preface he discussed his three purposes : (1) Indian princes use Persian in their correspondence, and so employees of the East India Company need a grammar to help them learn the language ; (2) the reader should be persuaded that Persian literature could provide the sorely needed enrichment for the stale neoclassical tradition in British poetry ; and (3) by illustrating his morphological and syntactic formulations through choice samples of Persian poetry, Jones was hoping to tempt European scholars to take up dusty manuscripts and translate them for intellectual and cultural reasons. In this connection he included a moral fable as a translation exercise, first in Persian prose and poetry and then in English. Another example was ‘A Persian Song of Hafiz, ‘an expanded version that became a standard poem in British literature.

The Grammar went through nine editions by 1828, not being superseded until even later.⁹ It earned for him the epithets of Persian Jones and Linguist Jones, and it led FitzGerald into Persian and thus to the Rubáiyát. It influenced European Orientalists and helped many laymen who were going into overseas service in the Middle East and India, but Jones’s hope that the gentry and nobility would study Persian was not fulfilled.¹⁰

The significant question concerns the linguistic, not popular, success and soundness of the book. The matter is so complex and extensive that only broad classifications, rather than individual examples, can be considered. For one thing, Jones apparently destroyed his work sheets. Nor did he ever explain in his correspondence, even with the Persian translator Count Reviczki, his method of linguistic analysis. But from scattered references in the Grammar it is clear that his interest began with a random pleasure reading through many pieces of Persian literature. In accord with his natural scholar’s curiosity, when he observed a certain form in Hafiz, for example, he searched for it elsewhere in that particular distribution. If he found other occurrences of it, he drew up a tentative descrip- tion of the form. Little by little he built up classifications in this way, subdividing and combining when his later, more experienced research directed him to do so, rather than systematically proceeding through an analysis of phonology, morphology, and then syntax, framing descriptive statements at each successive stage and rejecting or altering those found untenable on the basis of further distributional evidence. Rather than the basic operations of segmentation and classification, preconceived and rigorously applied, Jones’s method was much less systematic and depended on a corpus which was sometimes undependable, as will be seen. It was neither exhaustive nor systematic in the beginning, and yet, amazingly, he made few substantial errors and there is an admirable system to the Grammar.

Most of his ‘rules’ are descriptive, though he generalizes that if accomplished writers made use of such and such a form or construction in their works, then the neophyte might do well to imitate them. Jones avoids ‘Thou shalt not’s,’ thereby making few value judgments of the practices he has discovered in his corpus. In this sense he contradicts the approach of his contemporary grammarians. Even when he uses terms like accurate, correct, and rules, he is hardly being prescriptive.

In his Preface he calls himself a grammarian, but not of the English language or of the type of his friend Robert Lowth. He does not necessarily think of himself as an innovator in the form of grammar books, for he admits that he studied the arrangement of many books before deciding upon the final arrangement of his own materials. As he said : ‘Rules alone will avail but little, unless the learner will exemplify them in his own researches [i.e., reading] : the only office of a grammarian is to open the mine of literature, but they who wish to possess the gems must endeavor to find them by their own labors.’

At this point, the way in which Jones opens ‘the mine of literature ʼbecomes of chief concern. What constituted his corpus and how dependable was it as a representative sample of Modern Persian writing ? Oral sources had been available to him for periods of time long enough only for him to gain the barest idea of pronunciation, so that he could not take texts, question an informant, or record a conversation. Writing was his corpus by necessity as well as by preference. The available writing was heavily composed of Persian literature ranging backward in time for from four hundred to eight hundred years. At least he did not have to worry about inaccuracies from deciphering weathered inscriptions or reconstructing earlier forms, but therein still lies the greatest challenge to the representativeness of his corpus (or, more precisely, corpora). Admittedly it contained some writings in different dialects from different geo- graphical locations at different times, not to mention possible misreading of an occasional faded manuscript that was none too legible.

Today a linguist could not call such a seeming agglomerate a ‘corpus. ʼIf he had to work with it, he would make more of an attempt to pin down one chronological period than Jones could have, and all his formulations would be qualified by the fact that artistic writing is hardly typical of everyday writing, let alone everyday speech. However, literary writing was principally what Jones had to work with. Neither he nor anyone else of the day could have judged whether Sadi or Hafiz or Firdausi, for example, would provide the most representative sample. Jones used them all. In spite of the potentially dangerous difference in time, his corpus was in the ‘Shiraz literary dialect, ʼin which historical change would work more slowly, so that these could be grouped roughly together. Finally, the Grammar was designed to help people write in Persian and to read the writing in Persian, the latter being the rather formal style of communications from Indian princes, and the former being the equally non-colloquial style of British letter-writers who are corresponding with these princes.

Style is another consideration. Jones treated the matter of different styles intuitively, in modern fashion. It has been postulated that although stylistic differences can be described, the quantity of evidence and the detail of study required are so extensive (and the results less dependable than predictions based on statements about dialect), that they can be generally disregarded.¹¹ In fact, if it can be momentarily assumed that Jones was working on a single dialect, then it is patent that he recognized all styles within that dialect to be generally describable in terms of a single structural system, and was successful in subordinating all stylistic indications within utterances otherwise identical structurally. He may describe as ‘elegant’ two different literary quotations from two different writers used to illustrate different predictive statements, but on the basis of his total corpus he still concludes that one syntactic formula describes most utterances within the corpus.

Morphological dangers from using artistic writing as a corpus cannot be explained away. Some base and affixational morphemes of a relatively high frequency in a certain distribution in the Shãh Nämäh had been superseded by 1771, as a random checking of Jones’s noun and verb subclassification lists will demonstrate. His only justification is the strong desire for his readers to go to Persian literature in the original for artistic and intellectual purposes. Therefore, if a word obsolete in 1771 had a high frequency in the great poetry of the past, then there is justification for his use of the word instead of the one which superseded it, even to stating the complete paradigm (if there is one) if need be.

Partly as a means of checking on distributions and frequencies of morphemes, Jones kept his corpus open. The additions were often of contemporary works, as is evidenced on those occasions when he points out that a given practice is no longer followed. In commenting on the two-decades-old Nadir Shah manuscript which he had translated, for example, he notes that it and some other post-Hafiz writings contain a plural form different from the earlier form. Thereupon he makes his central value judgment : ‘These [historical changes] must be considered as barbarous, and are a proof that the late dreadful commotions which have ruined the empire of the Persians, have begun to destroy even the beautiful simplicity of their language.’

In his day the view of the grammarians whom he had so diligently studied, was that the English ‘language had passed its golden age and was far gone in decadence. This naturally led to the thesis that ancient forms are best to retain, in spite of obsolescence or even complete disuse.’¹² The thesis explains Jones’s belief that a Persian corpus containing older forms and meanings used by ‘authorities’ was not only acceptable but probably best for his purposes, better perhaps than a native speaker’s text in a modern dialect which might be ‘corrupted.’

A last negative point about Jones’s corpus might be made. It is not in ‘Indian Persian,’ although the Grammar was primarily designed to help Europeans in India, not the Middle East. However, he was chiefly thinking of writing, as, for example, in the case of Chinese, where the spoken dialects are mutually unintelligible but the writing is the same. He points out that there had been heavy ‘borrowing ’among Arabic, Persian, and certain other tongues then spoken in India, so that one should know these, too.

Potentially unreliable as was his corpus, he had excellent reasons for its choice. He was aware that languages change, that literary writings are somewhat formal and presumably removed from everyday speech, and that he nowhere catalogued his sources in order that his analysis might be checked by other scholars. In the face of such forbidding dangers, it is all the more remarkable that he made few major errors in his partial, popular grammar of the ‘Shiraz literary dialect ‘as represented in pre-eighteenth century Modern Persian writing. Regardless of the linguistic unsoundness of his overall approach to analysis, an important aspect of which is the kind of corpus that he selected to work with so as to provide his readers with models only of ‘elegant’ or ‘pure’ Persian (as opposed to what he thought of as ‘vulgarized,’ as in the case of substandard or rapidspeech forms), the final arrangement of his predictive statements fell into the modern pattern of phonology, morphology, and syntax, in that order.

Instead of phonology and related precise terms, he speaks of letters (characters of the writing system) and long and short vowels. Unlike the situation today, where one may secure a set of phonograph records in addition to the textbook, Jones could not furnish the learner with a native speaker for purposes of imitation and repetition. The best he could do was to stress in several places that ‘the perfect pronunciation of these letters can be learned only from the mouth of a Persian or an Indian,’ and that the reader should learn to pronounce the characters before trying to read the writing. In his later works he emphasizes the importance of knowing the Persian sound system.

But in the Grammar, despite his cautioning that the spelling in Meninski’s dictionary does not always reliably represent the pronunciation, there is a tacit assumption that each character stands for a minimal sound-unit.¹³ He tries to represent the sounds of the characters through his own English pronunciation as depicted by the Roman alphabet, truly a dangerous process. Examples of his imprecise, subjective descriptions are ‘soft g in gem,’ ‘extremely harsh,’ ‘another harsh Arabick letter,’ ‘exactly like our ch in the words cherry, cheek,’ ‘answers generally to our broad a,’ ‘the sound of our z,’ ‘the sound of f in fail,’ ‘a very strong aspirate,’ and ‘a slight aspiration.’

In short, Jones speaks with some understanding of aspiration, initial and medial and final positions, and liquids, but he lacks a basic knowledge of phonetics. His phonological section is a welter of imprecision and omissions, without any consideration of environment, for example. He is almost completely occupied by sounds in isolation, without even minimal pairs for illustration of contrastive distribution. He gives no concern whatsoever to pitch, and scarcely mentions stress and juncture. There is no list of the segmental phonemes.

How harshly is Jones to be judged for this failure in phonology ? At the time there was no set of phonetic and phonemic terms with precisely defined meanings, and no real understanding as to how individual sounds are articulated at what points by what organs of articulation. Any description would be couched in auditory rather than physiological terms. The whole eighteenth-century concept f language was antithetical to the modern view. All one can do is P o shake his head at Jones’s naive prediction that his reader can follow the suggested plan of study for less than a year, and then be able ‘to converse with the natives of India, not only with fluency, but with elegance,’ while at the same time granting that Jones’s approximation of the sounds of the Persian characters is quite good, what with the lack of certain correspondences between the Persian and the English writing systems.

In morphology, too, Jones was misled by contemporary views. Fortunately the result was not as bad as might have been, as has occurred when twentieth-century missionaries ‘analyzed’ certain exotic languages of Asia on the unconscious model of their own Latin grammar-English. Embedded in his Grammar are several revealing comparisons : ‘it will be necessary to add a table of the moods and tenses as they answer to those of European languages’; ‘the reader will soon perceive with pleasure a great resemblance between the Persian and English languages, in the facility and simplicity of their form and construction’; ‘Persian substantives, like ours, have but one variation of case’; and ‘The construction of the Persian tongue is very easy, and may be reduced to a few rules, most of which it has in common with other languages.’

There can only be approval for Jones’s modernity in not building his morphological predictive statements into a kind of Ripley’s ‘Believe It or Not,’ a list of what features familiar to him are not in Persian, or a list of compensations for what Persian does not have but that English has.¹⁴ Yet he began the study of his corpus with preconceived notions of what he might find, an attitude which ruled out in advance any really rigorous work in segmentation and classification. That he committed no huge blunders is attributable chiefly to the broad similarities of Persian to Latin, Greek, and English. Thus the form classes that he sets up and then further categorizes and briefly describes, are ‘noun ’and not ‘distributionally noun-like, ’ or ‘irregular verb’instead of some other name, for example. All his terms come from Latin grammar (he states in his Preface that he expects his readers to know these).

If his terminology can be used, one finds Jones happily postulating for Persian, as in English, (1) no gender in regard to grammatical relationships of words, (2) comparative and superlative forms for adjectives through the addition of postbases, (3) different forms for the various personal pronouns, and (4) the existence of adverbs, conjunctions, prepositions, and interjections. Contrarily, his preconceptions did not prevent him from discovering that Persian, unlike English, has no articles, that certain irregular verbs form their imperatives from obsolete infinitives (which he classifies except for a group he labels ‘Irregulars not reducible to any class’),¹⁵ and that an adjective usually follows its noun and is joined with it phonemically as a kind of postbase.

His use of the word reducible and his careful subclassing of verbs, together with other evidence too lengthy to be included in this paper, indicate that he did subject his corpus to a rather rigorous examination and that sometimes he was capable of good immediate constituent analysis, despite the fact that he had absolutely no previous model of morphological analysis to follow. Neither he nor any other European of the time, for example, had worked with Pănini’s grammar. Yet he did have the deliberate advantage of a corpus composed of writing, so that he began with a knowledge of the positions of most of the morphemic boundary markers and so did not have to establish word boundaries or even in some cases the boundaries of utterances and discursive units. Further, much of his corpus was poetry, and therefore the danger of error in determining stress morphemes, for example, was considerably diminished.

He wanted to keep the Grammar brief. One way was to avoid an exhaustive listing under each subclass, because it was unnecessary and too technical for his popular audience, as he intimated in the remark that ‘principal ... rules alone will avail but little, unless the learner will exemplify them in his own researches.’ Nor did he intend the book to be the Persian lexicon. On the other hand, sometimes when he cites a form from literary writing, he gives the lexical equivalent from Modern Persian speech. On those occasions when he includes a written form which even in the eighteenth century had a low frequency in speech, and he deliberately chooses not to give the colloquial equivalent, he was being motivated by the avowed desire for an ‘elegant ’or ‘pure ’language. He admits to such censorship at the head of his section on compounds : ‘I shall subjoin a list of the most elegant compounds that I can recollect. ‘Elsewhere he comments several times upon the ‘strange irregularities’introduced into Modern Persian by Arabic elements.

Throughout the long morphological section there is much transliteration. Except for obvious vowel-sound errors occasioned by the distance that eighteenth-century English spelling was already removed from pronunciation, coupled with the difficulties in representing certain spirants, this early transliteration is rather successful phonetically. Through the use of French diacritical marks, Jones is able to give a vague indication of the stress morphemes in his list of ‘the most elegant compounds.’ But in general only words in isolation are transliterated, so that this limited phonetic effort would constitute a phonemic hindrance to learning to read, even though the Grammar was not intended as a reader. When the words learned in isolation are arranged into an acceptable structure, the spoken utterance would, at best, sound most un-Persian.

The structural section of the book is shorter than the brief phonological one. The central inadequacy has already been suggested, stemming from Jones’s failure to use phonemic transcription. The central virtue lies in his success in drastically reducing the number of basic utterance formulae needed to describe the syntax of the writing composing his corpus. Intuitively perhaps he had discovered a cardinal principle of structural linguistics : the broader the basic utterance formula, the more valuable it is in indicating the relationships among the various lower structural levels. In terms of the broadest position classes he arrives at the formula NV, with concord.¹⁶

His qualification of the formula by means of the word usually leads him to group the principal exceptions under the more restricted formula NV, with ‘reverse ’concord. One exception is that plural forms of nouns denoting inanimate objects generally require a singular verb form. He gives an example of another, that singular forms of certain collective nouns require a plural verb form ; but in this case he apparently discovered several instances of the particular exception, without ever formulating the predictive statement describing it. The existence of these Arabic elements in Persian had helped interest him in the language in the first place. He betrays his general attitude, however, when he remarks in the Grammar that the introduction of the Arabic elements caused ‘strange irregularity in the Persian syntax.’

In hasty conclusion to this somewhat detailed consideration of the Grammar, it might be said that despite its failings the book was a brilliant product for its time. In the light of modern scientific method and knowledge the book is not a dependable grammar of Modern Persian of any given time. In the light of Jones’s avowed purposes the grandiose title he gave the book must be disregarded. Then his partial, popular grammar of the ‘Shiraz literary dialect ’as represented in pre-eighteenth-century Modern Persian poetry can be given its rightful due, even without reference to its huge popular success. In it he was moving in the right direction of a more scientific approach toward linguistics, rejecting false tentative conclusions through distributional evidence and taking new tentative stands one way or another on further questions evoked from his corpus (and so to the famous philologer’s passage fifteen years later). Finally, his failure in Persian phonetics, a failure as yet unrealized by him, was to lead directly to his development of the Jonesian System of transliteration, and indirectly to the phenomenal success with Sanskrit that was to have worldwide literary-linguistic impact.

Aside from devising the Jonesian System, he made only one other significant linguistic excursion into Persian matters—an attempted tracing of the tree of the Iranian subfamily. As indicated in the Grammar, he was interested in earlier stages in the development of Modern Persian, both for his curiosity as to what changes had occurred, and for the consequent improvement of the accuracy of his future translations of literature written earlier than the Shāh Nāmäh.

In 1771 an event brought him forcibly into contact with Avestan. The French scholar Anquetil Duperron issued a bulky three-volume translation titled Zend-Avesta, Ouvrage de Zoroastre. To the detriment of linguistic science, he chose to include savage attacks upon England, the famous Orientalist Thomas Hunt, and some other Oxford dons. Such an attack had to have an answer, and because Jones was unchallenged as the greatest language scholar in the nation, he found himself being looked to for that answer.

A second misfortune was involved, for Jones was not yet a linguist in the modern sense and would not be until he worked with Sanskrit. He still held most of the concepts of his day. Thus he viewed writing as language, and he believed writing to be more important than speech. He had only the barest of speculative thoughts as to the kinds or extent of changes that might have occurred since the time of Old Persian and Avestan. Certainly he did not expect the magnitude of the changes reflected in Duperron’s French translation.

There was posed a typical literary pattern—make a satiric attack upon a new, well-known book as a means of advancing one’s reputation. The stage was already set with the early questioning of Thomas Chatterton’s Rowley manuscripts, and James Macpherson’s colossal hoax with the Ossian materials. In view of the hostile relations between England and France, this was also an opportunity for Jones to vent his nationalistic feelings upon a Frenchman who was so ungrateful to Hunt, Oxford, and England.¹⁷

Approaching the three volumes with an emotional, literary attitude, Jones became suspicious that the translated manuscripts were modern forgeries. Two disturbing facts confronted him at once : the French version was of a poor quality, and the manuscript text had suffered orthographic revision (which Jones promptly called a translation), so that they were modern. Then there was Duperron’s promise to translate the Brahmans ‘sacred books, a promise so incredibly difficult of achievement that it seemed only another indication of the Frenchman’s poor knowledge of and about Oriental languages. The conclusion was growing in Jones’s mind that the man did not have sufficient linguistic knowledge to translate Zend even if he had a real Zend manuscript.

Two literary arguments strengthened the doubts. The evident influence of the French traveler Sir John Chardin upon Duperron led Jones to notice that some of the ideas in the translation were similar, suspiciously so, to those of Chardin. More convincing was Jones’s general disillusionment with the Avesta. It had been composed by the spirited philosopher Zoroaster and so presumably should have been of high literary quality. Instead, there were dull, dreary ideas, a book of ridiculous tales, absurd laws and rules, and strange demons and gods. Yet the world was being asked to believe that here was the code of the Zoroastrian religion ! At this point Jones’s literary value judgment became a linguistic one.

Inspecting the French translation more closely, he decided that the original manuscripts looked modern. There were Arabic words (or so he thought), though the Arabic strain had not appeared in Zend and Pahlavi before the seventh century. He saw no reason to burden his readers with further ‘proof. ‘He was so convinced of Duperron’s self-incrimination through internal evidence, that he felt it unnecessary to consult the Zend text itself. (Had he done so, he might have been more convinced as to its modernity, not to mention the shock at being confronted with the great differences between Zend and Modern Persian, just as the question of reconstructing the original spelling and so on perplexed later scholars for a time.) In his Lettre à Monsieur A*** du P***, then, he strongly asserted the charge of modern, forged manuscripts.

The linguists, of course, cannot understand why Jones did not go to the original Zend, especially since he cuttingly satirized Duperron’s frailties as a translator. Modern experience has shown just how badly a text can be mutilated through ‘translation, ’to the point that the original might be challenged as a fake. Jones did not have the benefit of such experience, and this time his usually intense curiosity failed him. He was enwebbed within a net of circumstances, not least of which was the negative, perhaps anti-linguistic attitude with which he picked up the three volumes for the first time. And, to give him all possible credit, he did not rely chiefly on language matters to advance his argument.

As is well known, the general eighteenth-century disappointment with the Avesta found its fiercest expression in the Lettre, which overnight provoked a long, bitter controversy.¹⁸ Duperron’s reputation was almost destroyed initially, for even many French language scholars and Orientalists were convinced. It was not until 1826 that Rask set the record straight in his Über das Alter und die Echtheit der Zend-Sprache und des Zend-Avesta, in the process accurately assessing the Lettre as ‘a libel full of venom and gall and quite unworthy of its author’s name.‘¹⁹ Since then Duperron’s pioneering work in Avestan has been accorded its rightful due.

It was not until 1789, three years after the philologer’s passage, that Jones made his other major linguistic blunder, a culmination of a direct chain from the Grammar and the Lettre. He had studied the Shãh Nämäh in connection with those works, but it was not until he had a good knowledge of Sanskrit morphology and had seriously begun to read Firdausi as preparation for translating the SohrabRustum episode, that he began to recognize hundreds of nouns in it to be ‘derivative ’from the Sanskrit, with only minor changes from the original ; many Persian imperatives to be Sanskrit verb roots ; and the moods and tenses of the Persian verb substantive to be deducible from the Sanskrit by simple, clear analogy. In the composition of words, too, he discerned an Indian rather than an Hamitic tendency. Tentatively concluding the Indian origin, he returned to the glossary of Duperron’s translation of the Avesta, where he was ‘inexpressibly surprised to find, that six or seven words in ten were pure Sanscrit.՝²⁰Duperron did not know Sanskrit; the Persian compiler probably did not either. Thereupon Jones concluded that the Zend list was authentic : ‘It follows, that the language of the Zend was at least a dialect of the Sanscrit, approaching perhaps as nearly to it as the Prácrit, or other popular idioms, which we know to have been spoken in India two thousand years ago. From all these facts it is a necessary consequence, that the oldest discoverable languages of Persia were Chaldaick and Sanscrit ; and that, when they had ceased to be vernacular, the Pahlavi and Zend were deduced from them respectively.’

Jones incorporated his ‘new and important’ conclusion (erroneous as it was) in ‘The Sixth Discourse ; on the Persians.’He wanted to discuss matters other than language, and so he deliberately did not take the space to list the Sanskrit roots and their Zend ‘derivatives. ‘In emphasizing the scientific objectivity of his reasoning, he stated flatly : “ I assure you, that I will assert nothing positively which I am not able satisfactorily to demonstrate. ‘In reality, of course, the germ of the error had occurred in the Grammar, in which he had called Pahlavi not Middle Persian but ‘Old ‘Persian. The error, coming at a time before linguists had learned how to reconstruct hypothetical forms, was perhaps natural. In some respects it is just a matter of terminology, for his term, ‘Chaldaick, ‘becomes Old Persian (which he recognizes as the father of Middle Persian), and he derives Modern Persian from Pahlavi. He had accurately postulated the Iranian line from Old Iranian, through Old Persian and then Middle Persian, to Modern Persian.

At that moment his evidence and method failed him, because consistency, completeness, and simplicity could not have been the analytical criteria eventually leading him to the false conclusion that Zend was derived from Sanskrit. Somewhere, probably because of the close resemblances between the earlier manifestations of the Indie and Iranian lines, he had gone wrong. By the error he contributed to the confusion surrounding the early work on the tracing of the Indo European family tree, work which he had initiated by means of the philologer’s passage. In the passage he had exploded the possibility that Greek and Latin were derived from Sanskrit. Now, only three years later, he had succumbed to the same pitfall with respect to Avestan. His conclusion helped delay the larger hypothesis that is accepted today : some Indo-European peoples, among whom the differentiation toward the Iranian and Indie language lines had perhaps started, engaged in a joint migration eastward, the former people settling in Central Asia and the latter ultimately going on to India.

What remains of Jones’s Persian linguistics can be told briefly. He had followed his own plan for the study of Persian : use an informant in learning the sound of the individual characters, get practice in reading the individual characters before memorizing the inflections, and finally do extensive reading, in addition to making written translations of Persian to English and vice versa. All along, the Grammar and Meninski’s dictionary would serve as guides. Meanwhile, one should not neglect practicing conversation with his informant. In less than a year he should be speaking ‘elegant ‘Persian fluently with Indian speakers of Persian, the implication being that one’s skill in speaking the language would mainly develop itself, magically, as it were.

Shortly after arriving in Calcutta, Jones found himself using his Persian. He was sitting beside a Persian scholar when several learned Indians came to pay their respects. He addressed them in his ‘Persian, ‘which was so incomprehensible that they thought it was English. One whispered to the scholar that they did not know English. In view of Jones’s reputation in Persian, he should speak that language to them. The scholar smiled but did not mortify Jones.²¹ The point was made on this occasion and probably others, however, whereupon Jones employed a native informant to help him an hour or so every morning for several years, the man even accompanying him on his vacations. He gained a keen knowledge of Persian phonetics, aiding his study of Sanskrit phonetics. Out of these came ‘A Dissertation on the Orthography of Asiatick Words in Roman Letters.’²²

As he explained in the essay, he devised the Jonesian System ‘so that each original sound may be rendered invariably by one appropriated symbol, conformably to the natural order of articulation, and with a due regard to the primitive power of the Roman alphabet. ‘Though he recognized that English orthography was ‘disgracefully and almost ridiculously imperfect, ‘he expected that major printing difficulties could be circumvented if he did not invent new symbols, but instead utilized French diacritical marks to create the extra symbols needed. Yet even this innovation plagued his system for transliterating Arabic, Persian, and Sanskrit words into English, not to mention phonemic barriers to efficient reading of the transcription because of his almost total omission of suprasegmental matters.

It is questionable whether his transliteration provided much of the flavor of the original. Even if he is accepted at his word that he has successfully taken into account a kind of rapid speech in order to indicate the reduction to weaker stresses of certain words, his omission of all but segmental matters makes it impossible to read his transliterated utterances with any naturalness (thus his initial failure to be able to speak Persian). Indeed, without the juncture, pitch, and stress indications, Jones’s reader would almost necessarily have to pronounce each word distinctly, with terminal juncture between each word.

At that point the adequacy and consistency of Jones’s segmental representation come into question. It is true that he was aiming for simplicity. For example, he was not devising a kind of IPA, as when he specifically ruled out the representation of Chinese dialects by his system. He wanted consistency, and he was moved by the great principle of getting closer to the original sounds and arrangements through transliteration rather than translation, while still maintaining a system unencumbered by allophonic representation. He was aware that each of his symbols stood for a category of sounds, but he intuitively steered away from the almost impossible task of trying to provide a separate symbol for every sound. He was also aware of some of the dialectal differences among his informants. Scattered through his later transliterations based on his system, there are variant spellings—thus pandit, pundit, and pendit, in the case of one of the Sanskrit words which he introduced into English. There is no evidence that he ever decided upon any one spelling as the normalized representation for even this high-frequency word, let alone the hundreds of examples in ‘A Dissertation on the Ortho- graphy of Asiatick Words in Roman Letters.’

None the less, in the essay he demonstrated a good knowledge of general phonetics, and some of his transliterative principles eventually won out. As Sir Monier Monier-Williams told the Royal Asiatic Society in 1890 : ‘as a result of a kind of natural selection or survival of the fittest, the practice of all Oriental scholars—so far as Aryan languages are concerned—is settling down into an acceptance of Sir William Jones’s principles of transliteration.’²³ Jones’s phonetic emphasis, especially in the case of the Sanskrit one that he helped foster, can be traced straight through to Rask, Grimm, and Verner. ‘The first long but slow steps away from the awkward fumblings of early European scholarship were taken only when Hindu phonetics had come to be thoroughly known to Sanskrit scholars and had been introduced by them into the stream of European scholarship. ‘²⁴ Jones’s Persian work, which led him to the Jonesian System, played a role in the development of the movement that culminated in the IPA, another milestone. Finally, his introduc- tion of Firdausi, Hafiz, Omar, et al., to the Western world in translation and summary brought them their richly deserved places in world literature much earlier than might otherwise have been the case.

In the light of modern knowledge, the story of Jones’s Persian linguistics is partly a record of failures. At times he was far enough ahead of his contemporaries to see above the expanse of unbroken error surrounding language study ; often, however, he was hopelessly submerged. The real break-through was the philologer’s passage, the more remarkable because of the conventional quality of the rest of his formulations. In the matrix of pre-scientific ideas he was able to discard the trivial and the erroneous, to formulate common source as a definition of relationship, a definition which has held without major change until today. In this sense Sir William Jones was the first modern linguist.

Source: Garland H. Cannon, ‘Sir William Jones’s Persian Linguistics,ʼ Journal of the American Oriental Society 78.262-273 (1958). By permission of the Journal of the American Oriental Society ; and the author, with some minor changes from his original text.

¹ His list of twenty-eight is not technically accurate. For example, he counts historical Persian as three languages : Deri, Pahlavi, and Persian. Four more are Sanskrit, Pali, Bengali, and Hindi. Jones also includes ‘runic’ in the twentyeight.

² Eugene Nida, Linguistic Interludes (Glendale, 1947), p. 131.

³ The italicized titles appeared as books ; titles in quotation marks appeared as parts of books. All dates indicate the earliest publication except for the three marked by asterisks, which appeared posthumously ; these indicate the date of composition. Eighteen of the writings are in The Works of Sir William Jones, ed. Lady Jones (London, 1807), in thirteen volumes. Lailí Majnún, which included a Preface in English, was published in Persian in Calcutta.

⁴ ‘Plan of an Essay on Education,’ Works, 1, 155-156.

⁵ In 1784, in ‘A Discourse on the Institution of a Society,’ Works, 3, 7.

⁶ Works, 10, 349-350.

⁷ Lord Teignmouth, ‘Memoirs of the Life, Writings, and Correspondence of Sir William Jones,’ Works, 1, 58.

⁸ See Laurence Lockhart, Nadir Shah (London, 1938), p. 296. L'Histoire de Nader Chah is in Works, 11-12. Of only slight linguistic interest here is Jones's printing of Persian literature in the original. He long contemplated but never published Jami's On the Loves ofYusef and Zuieika from a copper-plate engraving. He did reproduce his manuscript of Hatifi's Laili Majn£n. Interesting implications as to his views on teaching Persian can be found in ' Tales and Fables by Nizami " (which he translated from ' Makhzani Asrar,' of the Khamsa), in which he set above each translated sentence the original Persian. Another example of his use of Persian was the intermediate translation of his ' Hymn to Camdeo ' from Sanskrit to Persian before he turned this into English.

⁹ London, 1771, 1775, 1783, 1797,1801, 1804, 1809,1823,1828 ; also a French edition in London in 1772, and a second French edition in Paris in 1845. The modern grammar is still unwritten. See Carleton Hodge's review of Gilbert Lazard's Grammaire du persan contemporain in Language, XXXIV (January- March, 1958), 111-121. See Laurence Lockhart, Nadir Shah (London, 1938), p. 296. L'Histoire de Nader Chah is in Works, 11-12. Of only slight linguistic interest here is Jones's printing of Persian literature in the original. He long contemplated but never published Jami's On the Loves ofYusef and Zuieika from a copper-plate engraving. He did reproduce his manuscript of Hatifi's Laili Majn£n. Interesting implications as to his views on teaching Persian can be found in `Tales and Fables by Nizami " (which he translated from `Makhzani Asrar, `of the Khamsa), in which he set above each translated sentence the original Persian. Another example of his use of Persian was the intermediate translation of his `Hymn to Camdeo `from Sanskrit to Persian before he turned this into English.

¹⁰ R. M. Hewitt, ‘Harmonious Jones,’ Essays and Studies, 28 (1942), 48.

¹¹ Zellig S. Harris, Methods in Structural Linguistics (Chicago, 1951), p. 11. Much of the approach to Jones’s Grammar in this paper is freely taken from Harris.

¹² Sterling A. Leonard, The Doctrine of Correctness in English Usage 1700- 1800 (Madison, 1929), University of Wisconsin Studies in Language and Literature, No. 25, p. 135. At one point in the Grammar Jones states : ‘I here used his self and their selves instead of the corrupted words himself and themselves ; in which usage I am justified by the authority of Sidney, and of other writers in the reign of Elizabeth : self seems to have been originally a noun, and was, perhaps, a synonymous word for soul.’

¹³ Jones’ decision not to use a phonetic alphabet constitutes a major linguistic defect. He could not have known the term phoneme, but he had partially worked out the general concept. This was another of the unavoidable obstacles with which he was confronted, one that became acute when he was developing his transliterative system years later. Printing difficulties, together with the firm attitude of an European reading public unquestionably opposed to the idea of phonetic transcription of English speech, killed any possibility of a phonetic alphabet in the Grammar. This can be compared with the ‘dictionary attitude’ today, when linguists have had to count as a major break-through the adoption of the schwa symbol in some of the collegiate dictionaries, but where there are still the ‘long vowels’ and ‘short vowels’ that Jones speaks of, and in which there is a different ‘transcriptive’ system in each dictionary.

¹⁴ As categorized in Robert A. Hall, Leave Your Language Alone (Ithaca, 1950), pp. 114-115.

¹⁵ In this connection he casually suggests the whole concept of reconstruction of hypothetical forms :ʻ This remark on the formation of the Persian imperatives from an obsolete form, may be useful to those who are curious in ancient dialects ; as it will enable them to trace out a considerable portion of the old Persian language or Pehlevian, which has the same relation to the modern Persick, as the [Old] Icelandick has to the Danish, and the Saxon [i.e., Old English] to the [Modern] English ; and which was, perhaps, spoken in the age of Xenophon.’ His seeming error in the Iranian subfamily will be discussed later.

¹⁶ It cannot be denied that Harris' formula for most English utterances of NVX, where x is the utterance contour (op. cit., p. 349), would be more nearly accurate for Persian than Jones's NV. However, Jones's syntactic description is couched deliberately (and so inadequately) in terms of word order minus all consideration of the utterance contour. By the process of substitution each N and v (and x in Harris' case) can be worked down to a particular morpheme for each variable, or class mark, within the basic utterance formula.

¹⁷ See Arthur D. Waley’s recent popular study, ‘Anquetil Duperron and Sir William Jones, ‘History Today, 2 (January, 1952), 23-33.

¹⁸ Edward G. Browne, A Literary History of Persia, reprint of the re-issue (Cambridge, Eng., 1951), 1, 49. The Lettre is in Works, 10, 401-443.

¹⁹ As originally translated by Holger Pedersen, in his Linguistic Science in the Nineteenth Century, trans. John Spargo (Cambridge, Mass., 1931), pp. 25-26.

²⁰ As told in `The Sixth Discourse ; on the Persians,' Works, 5, 103-136.

²¹ The anecdote is in William Dick’s letter to Scott, August 23, 1819, Tullymet, Familiar Letters of Sir Walter Scott (Boston, 1894), 2, 55.

²² In Works, 5, 253-318.

²³ ‘The Duty of English-speaking Orientalists in regard to United Action in Adhering Generally to Sir William Jones’s Principles of Transliteration, Especially in the Case of Indian Languages, ‘Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (1890), p. 615.

²⁴ Murray B. Emeneau, ‘India and Linguistics, ‘AOS, 75 (July-September, 1955), 149-150. Jones’s conviction that he must know Sanskrit phonetics early in the study of that language stemmed indirectly from the experience gained from his earlier failure in Persian phonetics. See Emeneau’s cogent speculations on the significance of Jones’s native pundit and their use of a later school reworking of Pãnini, the only published consideration thus far of the way in which Jones learned Sanskrit.