Marcus Zuerius van Boxhorn

Van Boxhorn rejected this theory and assumed a common original language of Latin, Greek, Germanic, Russian, Welsh, Latvian, Lithuanian, Turkish and Persian, which he named Scythian.

Van Boxhorn first publicly postulated his theory in a work about the goddess Nehalennia, whose statues and altars were discovered in January 1647 in the Dutch province of Zeeland.

[5] The inspiration for van Boxhorn's theory was, among other things, the Lexicon Symphonum published in Basel in 1537 by the Bohemian humanist Sigismund Gelenius, who was born in Prague.

In 1575, Franciscus Raphelengius (Ravlenghien) (1539–1597), professor of Hebrew in Leiden, taught his students about the similarities between the Persian and the Germanic languages, which suggested a genetic relationship.

[7] In the library of his friend Petrus Scriverius, also known as Peter Schrijver, Boxhorn found the works of Rudolphus Agricola von Groningen, alias Roelof Huisman, Johannes Aventinus (Turmair) and Hadrianus Junius von Hoorn, alias Adriaen de Jonghe, who examined the relationship between Greek, Latin and Germanic.

A century after Boxhorn postulated his theory, the French scholar Gaston-Laurent Cœurdoux (1691–1779) found grammatical evidence that Sanskrit was related to Indo-Scythian, i.e. Indo-European languages.

[11] Because of his high standing with the British colonial government and his status in Asian society, he won recognition of the kinship of Sanskrit to Greek and Latin.

To prove the common origin of languages, van Boxhorn compared etymologies, inflection patterns and grammars of Greek, Latin, Persian, Old Saxon, Dutch and German, Gothic, Russian, Danish, Swedish, Lithuanian, Czech, Croatian and Welsh.