By James Cooper
In 1786 Sir William Jones, a Welsh philologist and judge of the supreme court of Bengal, sent shock waves throughout Europe with the following speech he gave in his address to the Asiatic society of Bengal. “The Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and the forms of grammar, 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 Sanskrit language contains some 2012 dhatus, which are word roots, these create the numerous dhatu rupas, which are word formations, which make up the Sanskrit language. Sanskrit can be likened to a lego set which contains some 2012 building blocks, from which one can create innumerable formations. The shock waves which rippled throughout Christian Europe with the discovery of Sanskrit, was the realisation that these dhatus, these Sanskrit word roots were riddled throughout the European languages.