As the overview previewed, this genealogy follows one question — is language change a law of nature, or a human practice? — and it starts at a moment when the answer was still wide open.
A single paragraph — Jones
In 1786, in Calcutta, the British judge William Jones told the Asiatic Society, in his annual address, this about Sanskrit:
The Sanscrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either; yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs, and in the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident. (Article 075)
This single paragraph became the starting point of the entire field of comparative linguistics. But what’s worth noticing here is what Jones does not show. He never explains the mechanism by which Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin came to resemble one another. All he shows is an intuition — “this much resemblance can’t be an accident” — and an inference — “there must have been a common ancestor” (Article 077). The question was born; the method was not yet.
Thirty-two years later — Rask
Thirty-two years after Jones’s address, in 1818, the traveling Danish linguist Rasmus Rask wrote this in his prize essay for the Royal Danish Academy:
Den grammatikalske Overensstemmelse er et langt sikrere Tegn paa Slægtskab eller Grundenhed…
(Grammatical agreement is a far surer sign of kinship or common origin… Article 104)
This was the step that turned Jones’s intuition into a testable procedure. An impression that words sound alike can always be explained away by coincidence or later borrowing. But if the machinery of grammar — the very pattern by which words change form — corresponds regularly across several languages, neither coincidence nor borrowing can explain that. Rask demonstrated this regularity, in a falsifiable way, by comparing it against clearly unrelated languages like Greenlandic and Malay (Article 107).
Not yet a “natural law”
At this stage, language change hasn’t yet been clearly placed on either side — “natural law” or “human practice.” What Rask showed was simply that correspondences follow a pattern; he hadn’t yet ventured into the question of “why” that regularity exists — whether it comes from a natural force, or from the behavior of human speakers. In terms of the overview’s axis, this chapter is still a starting point, belonging to neither side.
Even so, the seed of a direction is already here. Rask also wrote that “the language with the most elaborate grammar is the least mixed, the most original” (Article 106) — an early glimpse of the idea that treats complexity as an “original state” and simplification as “erosion.” That idea would be inherited by Grimm and Bopp in the next chapter, and eventually tip decisively toward the “natural law” side under Schleicher.
Summary
| Figure (work, year) | What they showed | Position |
|---|---|---|
| Jones (1786) | The resemblance among Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin can’t be an accident — an intuition | The question is born |
| Rask (1818) | Regular grammatical correspondence is the surest indicator of kinship — toward a testable procedure | The method is born |
In a nutshell — over thirty-two years, one person’s intuition that “this can’t be an accident” grew into a method — “regular correspondence” — that anyone could test. The next chapter looks at how this method came to be called a “law,” and bound up with the metaphor of an “organism.”