Sir William Jones FRS FRAS FRSE (28 September 1746 – 27 April 1794) was a British philologist, orientalist, indologist and judge.

The young William Jones was a linguistic prodigy, who in addition to his native languages English and Welsh,[4] learned Greek, Latin, Persian, Arabic, Hebrew and the basics of Chinese writing at an early age.

During this time he published Histoire de Nader Chah (1770), a French translation of a work originally written in Persian by Mirza Mehdi Khan Astarabadi.

This was done at the request of King Christian VII of Denmark: he had visited Jones, who by the age of 23 had already acquired a reputation as an orientalist, and in appreciation of his work he was granted membership in the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters.

[9] He spent some time as a circuit judge in Wales, and then became involved in politics: he made a fruitless attempt to resolve the American Revolution in concert with Benjamin Franklin in Paris,[10] and ran for the post of Member of Parliament from Oxford in the general election of 1780, but was unsuccessful.

His work, The principles of government; in a dialogue between a scholar and a peasant (1783), was the subject of a trial for seditious libel (known as the Case of the Dean of St Asaph)[12] after it was reprinted by his brother-in-law William Davies Shipley.

In the Subcontinent he was entranced by Indian culture, an as-yet untouched field in European scholarship, and on 15 January 1784 he founded the Asiatic Society in Calcutta.

Jones’s works, especially his translations, with their philological and anthropological appeal, became a major inspiration of a certain orientalist strain discernible in Romantic poetries such as Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” or Fitzgerald’s “Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam".

[21][22] In 1786 Jones postulated a proto-language uniting Sanskrit, Iranian, Greek, Latin, Germanic and Celtic, but in many ways, his work was less accurate than his predecessors, as he erroneously included Egyptian, Japanese and Chinese in the Indo-European languages, while omitting Hindustani[20] and Slavic.

[24] Nevertheless, Jones's third annual discourse before the Asiatic Society on the history and culture of the Hindus (delivered on 2 February 1786 and published in 1788) with the famed "philologer" passage is often cited as the beginning of comparative linguistics and Indo-European studies.

[25] 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 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 Gothic and the Celtic, 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.This common source came to be known as Proto-Indo-European.

This idea fell into obscurity due to a lack of evidence at the time, but was later taken up by amateur Indologists such as the colonial administrator Herbert Hope Risley.

[citation needed] After reaching Calcutta, Jones was unhappy with the appointed pandits of the court, who were tasked with interpreting the laws of Hinduism and contributing to judgements.

After a number of cases in which different pandits came up with different rulings, Jones determined to thoroughly learn Sanskrit so that he could independently interpret the original sources.

[31] Jones's final judicial project was suggesting and leading the compilation of a Sanskrit "digest of Hindu Law," with the original plan of translating the work himself.

Jones said that "either the first eleven chapters of Genesis ... are true, or the whole fabrick [sic] of our national religion is false, a conclusion which none of us, I trust, would wish to be drawn."

He claimed, in a letter published in French (1771), that the translator Anquetil-Duperron had been duped, that the Parsis of Surat had palmed off upon him a conglomeration of worthless fabrications and absurdities.

[36] Herman Melville's Moby-Dick mentions William Jones in Chapter 79, "The Prairie":[37]Champollion deciphered the wrinkled granite hieroglyphics.

Read it if you can.Edgar Allan Poe's short story "Berenice" starts with a motto, the first half of a poem, by Ibn Zaiat: Dicebant mihi sodales si sepulchrum amicae visitarem, curas meas aliquantulum fore levatas.