Notes about the historical setting of William Jones's matchless footnote insight into the actual historical secular relationship of Sanskrit to Greek and Latin and why nobody saw it entirely before. [D.R.H.]
From the very small amount I’ve read about Jones and his famous discovery (which I did because of this column), it appears that he was neither the first to identify the relationship nor the most technically accurate in describing it. It seems as if a large part of what’s important about his slightly late, slightly warped version of the discovery is already contained in this column, though: Jones, unlike those who had discovered it earlier, had the good sense (or the luck) to present his work to people who recognized what it could mean and how much it could mean - and who, rather than just congratulating him, “picked it up and ran with it”.