William Jones (philologist)
| William Jones | |
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A steel engraving of Sir William Jones, after a painting by Sir Joshua Reynolds
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| Puisne judge of the Supreme Court of Judicature at Fort William in Bengal | |
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In office 22 October 1783 – 27 April 1794 |
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| Personal details | |
| Born |
September 28, 1746 Westminster, London |
| Died |
April 27, 1794 (aged 47) Calcutta |
Sir William Jones FRS FRSE (28 September 1746 – 27 April 1794) was an Anglo-Welsh philologist, a puisne judge on the Supreme Court of Judicature at Fort William in Bengal, and a scholar of ancient India, particularly known for his proposition of the existence of a relationship among European and Indian languages, which would later be known as Indo-European languages. He, along with Henry Thomas Colebrooke and Nathaniel Halhed, founded the Asiatic Society of Bengal in 1784, and started a journal called Asiatick Researches.
William Jones was born in London at Beaufort Buildings, Westminster; his father William Jones (1675–1749) was a mathematician from Anglesey in Wales, noted for introducing the use of the symbol π. The young William Jones was a linguistic prodigy, who in addition to his native languages English and Welsh, learned Greek, Latin, Persian, Arabic, Hebrew and the basics of Chinese writing at an early age. By the end of his life he knew thirteen languages thoroughly and another twenty-eight reasonably well, making him a hyperpolyglot.
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