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Article: The mother tongue: linguists are working back from modern speech to re-create the first language of the human race. (Science & Society) (Cover Story)
- Article from:
- U.S. News & World Report
- Article date:
- November 5, 1990
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1990 All rights reserved. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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In 1786, Sir William Jones, an Englishman serving the Crown as a judge in India, turned a series of seeming coincidences into an extraordinary discovery about human nature. A scholar of the Orient by training, Jones had embarked on an effort to learn Sanskrit, the language in which many ancient Indian religious and literary texts are written. To his amazement, Jones found that Sanskrit's grammatical forms and vocabulary bore a striking resemblance to those of Greek and Latin, so much so that "no philologer could examine them all three without believing them to have sprung from some common source." As Charles Darwin was to assert almost a century later about the human ...