Sir William Jones was born in London, England, on September 28, 1746 and passed away in Kolkata on April 27, 1794, a British linguist and an Ancient Indian researcher. William is known as the inventor of the Indo-European language family.
Jones himself was born in London, whose father was a mathematician. Jones when young was already very good at speaking, able to speak Latin, Arabic, Persian and up to the basics of Chinese characters. At the end of his life, he was able to master up to 28 languages.
Although his father was no longer there when he was only 3 years old, Jones is still studying at the university. Jones graduated at University College, Oxford in 1764 and immediately tested a career as a teacher and translator for the next 6 years.
In this period he succeeded in publishing Histoire de Nader Chah, a Persian literary work that was successfully translated by Jones in French, at the request of King Christian VII of Denmark and visiting Jones.
At the age of 22, Jones already has a very good reputation as a famous orientalist. This became the first of his works on Persia, Turkey and the Middle East in general.
Beginning in 1770, for approximately 3 years, Jones studied law that eventually brought him to India. After completion of duty in Wales and given a new assignment to deal with the American Revolution along with Benjamin Franklin in Paris, but that did not work, Jones was sent to work at the Supreme Court, in Kolkata Bengal in 1783.
There, he was interested in Indian culture, which at the time was underestimated by European scholars and founded the Asiatick Society of Bengal. Over the next 10 years, he published so many works on India and launched a modern study in practically all social sciences.
Jones wrote many things about law, music, literature, botany, to geography. He made the first translation of several important works in Indian literature.
Of all these findings, Jones is primarily known as a figure stating if Sanskrit is a language similar to Greek and Latin. In his book The Sanscrit Language (1786) he exposed allegations if all three languages have the same source and if they are all likely to have relatives with Gothic language, Celtic and Persian languages.
The third paper and published in 1798 with the famous "philologer" fragment is often cited as the opening of a study of comparative language and Indo-European studies.
Although the Dutchman Marcus Zuerius van Boxhorn (1612-1653) and others were aware that the Old Persian language was in the same language as the European language, no later than the middle of the seventeenth century and with an American colonist named Jonathan Edwards Jr , published in 1787 when the Algonquin and Iroquois languages were related together by giving evidence, Jones's inventions that could really make popular studies of Indo-European language studies and possibly the first to use comparative language .
Jones himself is also indirectly responsible for the emergence of a form of Romantic Romantic poetry movement which is also supported by Lord Byron and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, since the translation of the "eastern" poetry is the source of this style.