You may ask what relevance this essay has to the libertarian argument. One answer is that it has no less relevance than Bryan’s reviews of Korean splatter films, or his cruel attacks on his less fortunate classmates. If Bryan can write about that, why should I not write about the things that interest me? A better answer is that a libertarian activist should do what he can to defend the liberal civilisation of the West—and to spread such enlightenment as he can about what that civilisation has achieved. Here, then, are my thoughts on Indo-European linguistics. (SW)

When the Greeks and Romans first compared their languages, we might expect obvious questions to have been raised. These are best explained by quoting from an e-mail Dr Gabb sent to my mother in 2020 when she was looking for a teacher of the ancient languages:

Since Sebastian is eleven, and has no other languages beside an imperfect knowledge of spoken Cantonese, I strongly suggest that we should begin with Latin. This will be quite enough of a shock to his assumptions about language. We can begin Greek after six months. The two languages are so similar in their basic grammar and syntax that either forms a good introduction to the other. But the greater irregularities and range of Greek mean that Latin is best started first.

Similar in their basic grammar and syntax. And so they are—similar in great things and in little. Indeed, it was not until I hit the second aorist that I grew out of believing that Greek was just an exotic dialect of Latin. How could the ancients not have seen what I did when I was eleven? Here were two peoples, with distinct customs and histories, whose languages seemed too close to have developed entirely apart. The Roman grammarians observed the resemblance of luna and selēnē, pater and patēr, rex and archē. Yet neither Greeks nor Romans made more than the most superficial connection. This is because the interpretive models of the ancient world were not equipped for anything more than such shallow resemblance.

The Greeks, even when they noticed patterns, never hypothesised that languages might descend from a common ancestor. The Romans, who extensively borrowed from Greek, never extended this into a historical theory of language origins. Why? The answer is partly empirical. Ancient pagans hardly studied foreign languages at all. The Greeks studied their own language, and often not even the dialects beyond Attic. The Romans, for the most part, studied Greek. But beyond that, there was neither curiosity nor method. Without the systematic study of other language families—Semitic, Indo-Iranian, Celtic—they lacked the comparative base from which to derive hypotheses. The notion of language as a historical organism, subject to evolution, was simply unavailable to them.At best, the grammatical writers supposed that Latin was a degenerate dialect of Greek, its rougher edges explained away as the result of rustic corruption or imperial ambition. That theory, though widespread, was false—and not even especially close. But no better one existed.

The mediaeval period did little to improve matters. Christian scholars inherited Greek and Latin but lacked the tools to analyse them rigorously. Isidore of Seville, writing in the early seventh century, compiled a massive encyclopaedia—Etymologiae—which aimed to explain the origins of words and concepts. Yet his etymologies were often fanciful, grounded in theology or folk wisdom rather than comparative analysis. He believed that Latin, Greek, and Hebrew were all descended from a primal sacred language, possibly the tongue spoken before Babel. Thus lex (law) came from legere (to read), and homo (man) from humus (earth), and sometimes even Adam. These guesses were not just wrong; they were methodologically flawed. Medieval philology was rich in theological speculation but poor in empirical rigour. It would take the Renaissance revival of ancient texts—and eventually the Enlightenment’s empirical spirit—to point linguistics toward science.

That moment, as anyone familiar with the field knows, arrived in 1786.

The founding document of Indo-European linguistics is not a book, but a short paper read aloud to an audience of British Orientalists in Calcutta. The man was Sir William Jones—a jurist and scholar of Sanskrit—and the paper was his Third Anniversary Discourse before the Asiatick Society of Bengal. Its most famous lines are among the most quoted in the discipline:

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… than could possibly have been produced by accident…

Jones’s insight was not entirely new. Others had observed overlaps between European and Indian languages before, and at least one Italian missionary, Filippo Sassetti, had speculated about a common ancestry as early as 1585. But Jones brought intellectual prestige and clarity. He framed the issue not as mere lexical resemblance but as systematic likeness. Conjugations, declensions, and root patterns matched too well to be coincidence. In effect, Jones proposed that Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin all descended from a common ancestor—what we now call Proto-Indo-European.

It is easy to mythologise the man. Jones was not a modern linguist. He had no formal method, and his conclusions—though broadly correct—were often speculative. But the significance of his lecture lies not in its completeness, but in its provocation. He made the idea of a common ancestry plausible, even compelling. The scientific work of Indo-European linguistics would begin with others, but Jones gave the project its intellectual birth.

Where Jones offered insight, Franz Bopp offered method. His 1816 monograph Über das Conjugationssystem der Sanskritsprache compared the verbal systems of Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Persian, and Germanic. For the first time, someone tried to identify regular correspondences not just in vocabulary but in inflectional morphology. Bopp’s work laid the foundation for comparative grammar.

He did not work with phonological laws as later scholars would, but his comparison of verbal endings and root structures showed that these languages had not simply borrowed from one another, but inherited common patterns from a shared ancestor. The idea of Indo-European was no longer speculative—it had become demonstrable.

Others followed. Rasmus Rask and Jacob Grimm added a phonological dimension. Grimm’s Law, for instance, showed that systematic sound changes governed the relationship between Latin p and English f (pater vs father), or Latin t and English th (tres vs three). These were not exceptions—they were laws.

August Schleicher took the next step. He attempted to reconstruct the Proto-Indo-European language, publishing a fable written in the hypothetical tongue. His Compendium der vergleichenden Grammatik (1861–62) introduced the family-tree model (Stammbaum), which visualised the development of languages as divergent branches from a common trunk.

Though elegant, the tree model was too rigid. It did not account for contact between languages or shared innovations across branches. But it gave historical linguistics its visual grammar—the idea that languages, like species, evolve.

In the late 19th century, the Neogrammarian school insisted on the regularity of sound change. Led by Karl Brugmann and Hermann Osthoff, they declared that phonological change followed inviolable rules: no exceptions unless caused by analogy or borrowing. This rigour allowed scholars to reconstruct roots and paradigms with astonishing precision.

Brugmann’s Grundriss der vergleichenden Grammatik der indogermanischen Sprachen became the standard for a generation. His influence remains, especially in the analytical framework that underpins much modern reconstruction.

Ferdinand de Saussure, better known today for structuralist theory, made his mark on Indo-European linguistics by proposing the existence of missing sounds—“laryngeals”—to explain irregularities in vowel patterns. His predictions, based entirely on internal reconstruction, were later confirmed with the discovery of Hittite, which preserved these hypothesised consonants. This was a triumph. It showed that linguistic reconstruction could not only describe the past but predict it.

In the 20th century, Indo-European studies expanded into more abstract territory. Scholars like Emile Benveniste and Jerzy Kuryłowicz explored morphological categories such as ablaut, Narten roots, and reduplication. Syntax, long ignored, became a serious topic thanks to scholars like Winfred Lehmann.

Etymology also evolved. The Wörter-und-Sachen movement stressed that vocabulary must be studied in its cultural context. Tools, rituals, and social structures leave linguistic traces. Lexicographers such as Julius Pokorny and more recently the authors of the Leiden Indo-European Etymological Dictionary produced monumental reference works cataloguing this inheritance.

Not all developments were uncontroversial. The glottalic theory challenged the traditional view of the Indo-European stop system, proposing that voiced stops were actually glottalised. Though typologically plausible, the theory remains divisive.

Others pursued the dream of macrofamilies—Indo-Uralic, Nostratic, even Eurasiatic. These hypotheses propose deeper genetic links between Indo-European and other language families. But the evidence, often statistical or typological, remains thin.

Two centuries after Bopp, Indo-European linguistics remains a living field. Its internal debates are technical, but its premise is bold: that we can, by comparison and inference, peer back into a time before writing, before nations, before the world we know.

We should not take this for granted. The ancients did not achieve it. The mediaevals, for all their theological ingenuity, could not reach it. It was the scientific revolution—and men like Jones, Bopp, and Brugmann—that made it possible.

The Indo-European languages—Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, Old Irish, Gothic—are not just relics. They are living archives of the human mind. To study them is to recover our intellectual ancestry. And in a world that increasingly forgets its roots, that is a discipline worth preserving.

Bibliography

• Beekes, Robert S. P. and Lucien van Beek. Etymological Dictionary of Greek. Leiden: Brill, 2010.
• Benveniste, Émile. Origines de la formation des noms en indo-européen. Paris: Adrien-Maisonneuve, 1935.
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