In 1786 Sir William Jones, a Welsh philologist and judge of the supreme court of Bengal, sent shock waves throughout Europe with the following speech he gave in his address to the Asiatic society of Bengal.
“The Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and the forms of grammar, than could possibly ha