Chapter 291: The Common Source

A judge went out to Bengal in 1783, William Jones, a Londoner of Welsh blood, A lawyer who had learned, by the age of thirty, a dozen tongues, and read a score more, Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Arabic, Persian, the flood Of languages his father, a mathematician, had left him the door To open. In Kolkata he sat on the bench of the Supreme Court, And wanted to judge the Hindus by their own law, not through interpreters, So he learned Sanskrit from a pandit, a physician of the Vaidya sort Who would teach him, a foreigner, the sacred tongue. And the frontiers Of the European mind moved. He founded the Asiatic Society in 1784, And on the second of February, 1786, he stood before it and said: The Sanskrit 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, the thread Of its roots and grammar bearing to both of them a stronger affinity Than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong, indeed, That no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them To have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists. The seed Of it: Gothic too, he said, and Celtic, and old Persian, of the same family. A family. Languages have parents. They have cousins. They have a tree. Say *father*: Sanskrit *pitar*, Greek *patēr*, Latin *pater*, Gothic *fadar*, the homily Of one word in five mouths. Say *mother*, *brother*, *three*, *night*, *sea*: The same faces under different skins. Hold this, in a book of genealogy: The tongues we speak have ancestors we can trace, and one mother, lost, Whom no one heard, whom scholars would rebuild, sound by sound, the eulogy Of a dead speech: Proto-Indo-European, spoken perhaps on the steppe, the frost And the grass of six thousand years ago, by a people who left no writing, Only their words in the mouths of half the world. And their gods: the sky-father, *Dyēus ph₂tēr*, who became Zeus and Jupiter and the lightning Of the Vedic Dyaus; and the thunder-god who strikes the serpent, rather The oak, *Perkwunos*, who became Perkūnas of the Lithuanian pagans And Perun of the Slavs, and, by another root, the cousin of Thor. The gods have a family tree too. A book that has kept the ancestors of nations Now finds the ancestors of the words for them. And more: He was not the first. Hold that, honestly. A Florentine merchant in Goa, Filippo Sassetti, had noticed in 1585 that Sanskrit numbers were like Italian. A Dutch scholar, Boxhorn, had guessed at a common source. A French Jesuit, slow And careful, Coeurdoux, in Pondicherry, had written it out in 1767. The medallion Went to Jones because he said it best, and at the right time, to the right room. And he got things wrong: he thought Egyptian and Chinese and the speech of Peru Were of the same stock. They are not. The bloom Of the true idea grew among the errors. That is how most truths grew. He translated *Shakuntala*, Kalidasa's play, in 1789, And Goethe read it and wept, and put its form into the prologue of *Faust*. He died in Kolkata in 1794, at forty-seven. The line From his speech ran to Bopp and Grimm, and to the comparative house Of all the world's languages: Uralic, Bantu, Austronesian, the families Of human speech, mapped like the families of human blood. And the darkness, which this book must name: a word the Sanskrit families Used for themselves, *ārya*, noble, was taken by the cruel, the flood Of the nineteenth century's race-theory, and made a race, the *Aryans*, A master race of fair northerners who had never been, And the word was used to murder millions. The tree of language was the parent Of no blood at all. Speech is not race. The green Of the tree of words grows over every border, through conquest And marriage and trade and learning; a language is a gift passed hand to hand, Not a blood in the veins. That is the truest and the hardest Lesson of the common source: the family is in the mouth, not in the land. Say *father* in your tongue. Hear, under it, a voice six thousand years away. Say *night*, *star*, *mother*. The common source no longer exists, And it speaks every day. Honour the dead speech by what you say. Every word is an ancestor. The tree persists.