Jones Addresses the Asiatic Society and Names a Lost Common Ancestor

Sanskrit philology studies the language and textual transmission of Sanskrit literature from the Vedas onward, establishing what a passage most plausibly meant in its original context and how its text has varied across manuscripts. The British judge and orientalist William Jones delivered his Third Anniversary Discourse to the Asiatic Society in Calcutta on 2 February 1786, arguing that Sanskrit bore too strong a structural resemblance to Greek and Latin, in verb roots and grammatical forms, for the likeness to be accidental, and that all three must have sprung from a common source that no longer existed, the founding statement of comparative Indo-European linguistics.

Jones's discourse gave Sanskrit philology both its founding method, systematic grammatical comparison rather than casual resemblance, and its larger significance beyond India alone, since establishing Sanskrit's place in a documented language family is what lets scholars date and cross check Vedic and later Sanskrit religious texts against a much wider comparative record. The atlas relies on Sanskrit philology wherever a Vedic, Puranic or classical Sanskrit passage's precise meaning or textual history bears on a claim about early Hindu or Buddhist doctrine.