Discovery of Modern Linguistics

For a long time India was run by the British East India Company, not the British government itself. After the British government took over, it set up Colleges for training its citizens to become the local administrators. One of the goals of these colleges was to teach the languages required for effective administration.

In the South of India, most of the people spoke Tamil and Telugu, but hardly any civil servants did. The main reason was that in Calcutta, in the north, they didn't have local Tamil and Telugu populations, and it was from Calcutta that most British got their language instruction.

It was in this setting that Francis Whyte Ellis, the founder of the College of Fort St. George in Madras, with the incalculable help of local Indian scholars, brought about the theory that languages have roots and the roots of the Dravidian family (principally Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam and Kannada) are distinct from that of the rest of India.1 Before this time in the West, it was generally believed that God had made the languages of the world as a reprisal for the attempt by the citizens of Babel to build a tower to reach to God. God made Chinese speak Chinese, and there had been numerous efforts to trace the lineage of all languages to Ham, Shem and Japeth, the surviving sons of Noah on the Ark.

Halhed's preface to A grammar of the Bengal language is a very important text for us, as it is the first account in English concerning Sanskrit and its relation to other languages., and presents some of the general views of Sanskrit that prevailed at the Orientalist establishment at Calcutta. He describes Sanskrit as 'the grand Source of Indian Literature, the Parent of almost every dialect from the Persian Gulph to the China Seas ... a language of the most venerable and unfathomable antiquity,' which, though now shut up in the libraries of brahmins, 'apperas to have been current over most of the Oriental World'. Traces of it are still to be found in almost every part of Asia. Halhed was astonished to find Sanskrit's similarities with Persian and Arabic, and even Latin and Greek -- not in the tehnical and metaphorical terms, which, he says, belong to a higher stage of civilizations and thus might have been borrowed from other languages, but in 'the main ground-work of language, in monosyllables, in the names of numbers, and the appelations of such things as would be first discriminated on the immediate dawn of civiliations'"2