[SunkenCiv]

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[CarrotAndStick]

European scholarship in Sanskrit, begun by Heinrich Roth (1620 - 1668) and Johann Ernst Hanxleden (1681 - 1731), led to the proposal of the Indo-European language family by Sir William Jones, and thus played an important role in the development of Western linguistics.

Indeed, linguistics (along with phonology, etc.) first arose among Indian grammarians who were attempting to catalog and codify Sanskrit's rules. Modern linguistics owes a great deal to these grammarians, and to this day, for example, key terms for compound analysis such as bahuvrihi are taken from Sanskrit.

[CarrotAndStick]

The first proposal of the possibility of common origin for some of these languages came from the Dutch linguist and scolar Marcus Zuerius van Boxhorn in 1647. He discovered the similarity among Indo-European languages, and supposed the existence of a primitive common language which he called "Scythian".

He included in his hypothesis Dutch, Greek, Latin, Persian, and German, later adding Slavic, Celtic and Baltic languages. He excluded languages such as Hebrew from his hypothesis. However, the suggestions of van Boxhorn did not become widely known and did not stimulate further research.

The hypothesis re-appeared in 1786 when Sir William Jones first lectured on similarities between four of the oldest languages known in his time: Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, and Persian. Systematic comparison of these and other old languages conducted by Franz Bopp supported this theory, and Bopp's Comparative Grammar, appearing between 1833 and 1852 counts as the starting-point of Indo-European studies as an academic discipline.