Civilization / Humanities & Culture

Comparative Linguistics

William Jones (1786) notes that Sanskrit, Greek and Latin share a common source; regular sound laws turn languages into family trees.

Rask, Bopp and Grimm (Grimm's law, 1822) showed regular sound changes among Indo-European languages, and later linguists reconstructed Proto-Indo-European. The method of regular correspondences underlies the study of language history and aided the decipherment of lost scripts.