ABSTRACT
Ancestors are an important part of history, so the book begins with the search for the ancestors of English. The first landmark is a discovery associated with an eighteenth-century lawyer named Sir William Jones. In him, several diverse elements came together - a gift for languages, including knowledge of Latin and Greek; a lengthy stay in India, where he learned the ancient Indian language, Sanskrit; and a passion for seeking connections between different cultures and languages. All these elements helped lead Jones to suggest that there’s a large group of languages which form a single family, known now as the ‘Indo-European’ family. Germanic languages, including English, are members of that family. This chapter describes what led to his discovery, and what came after it - the basis of what we know today about English’s family ties, and its ancestors.
