Languages In the World by Julie Tetel Andresen, Phillip M. Carter

no matter how illogical, and claim it to be part of Hindu code. Jones had no alternative but to accept it. Knowing well the pitfalls of translations, he was wary of depending on Persian versions of Hindu laws, and he was unimpressed with the single English translation that existed of an original Sanskrit law code. So, he set out to learn Sanskrit, whereupon he encountered another large problem: no Brahman would take him on as a student, and this caste was the keeper and preserver of the sacred language and its manuscripts. Even when he assured the Brahmans he would not defile the religion by asking to read the Vedas, no one would help. Eventually, he found a vaidya , a medical practitioner, who knew Sanskrit but who himself was prohibited from reading certain texts, to teach him. Over the next few years, Jones applied himself to learning this important language.
    Having been well educated at Harrow and University College, Oxford, Jones also knew Greek. It did not take him long to see that the Greek word for such a common verb as ‘I give,’ namely dídōmi, was very similar to the Sanskrit word for ‘I give,’ namely dádāmi . In fact, he found the verbal paradigms of the two languages to be remarkably coincident, along with great stretches of vocabulary. In 1786, in his Third Anniversary Discourse to the Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal (a society he himself established), he had determined that ancient Sanskrit and classical Greek and Latin bore “a stronger affinity,” as he put it, “both in the roots of verbs and in the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong indeed, that no philologer could examine all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source.” He went on to suggest that Germanic and Celtic as well as Old Persian were also likely related. This discourse was the first and clearest expression of the possibility that Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin, and perhaps others, were divergent later forms of some single prehistoric language.
    Although Jones's works on Hindu law did form the basis for much of Indian jurisprudence for the next hundred years or more, he was never able to see through his list of judicial reforms. Neither did he ever return to England, for he died in Kolkata at the age of 48. He did, however, make a lasting contribution to language studies for pointing scholars to the right path for working out the historical relationships among the languages of Europe and South Asia. It is the focus of this chapter to summarize the major kinds of classifications of the world's languages – historical, areal, typological, and functional – that linguists have developed in the more than two centuries since Jones's Third Anniversary Discourse.
Of Linguistics, Philology, Linguists, and Grammarians
    In Chapters 1 and 2, our effort was to discuss the dynamics of the language loop in terms of the historical, cultural, and cognitive dimensions in which it is instantiated, developed, and maintained. Another way of saying this is: individuals – no matter what linguistic activity they are engaged in, be it speaking, signing, listening, reading, or writing – are always in one context or another. They have been so since the beginning of the time we identify humans as such; they are so from the moment they are born. However, there are important traditions of study that take languages out of context in order to compare and contrast them, and to see what kinds of understandings fall out from comparative process. In this book, we call the practice of taking language out of context in order to study it philology .
    The modern use of the classical term philology was created in Germany toward the end of the eighteenth century. A student named Friedrich August Wolf refused to register in any of the four faculties that then constituted the entire university curriculum at Göttingen University: philosophy, medicine, law,