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This article, revised and updated, is based on an address delivered in Calcutta on the occasion of the two-hundredth anniversary of Sir William Jones' original assertion of a genetic relation obtaining between Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin, ". . . [a relation] so strong indeed that no philologer could examine them without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which perhaps no longer exists" (Asiatick Researches 1 [1788]: 422).
Sir William Jones' powerful and often-quoted observation-based on his study of phenomena furnished by the "exquisitely refined" Sanskrit language "both in the roots of verbs and in the forms of grammar"-has long epitomized the statement of the mechanics of genetic comparison. I wish to suggest in this happy bicentenary celebrating Sir William's remarkable achievement that this same Sanskrit language provides us with the clearest adequately complex example we know and can trace in its full development of the mechanics of acquisition by a language of a Sprachbund trait or supposedly diffused areal feature.
It should be noticed at the outset that we rely for our entire demonstration on the results of Indo-European genetic comparison that Sir William's insight set in train. Sir William found Sanskrit to be more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either. It is difficult today for us to attach simple values or unique parameters to these characterizations. He also found comparisons with Gothic and Celtic not quite so forcible. Today we recognize that each of these imposes a more complex task of comparison with Sanskrit or with Greek than the last two with one another: Today there is even debate over just how Germanic is to be related on the Indo-European level to Sanskrit and Greek, though an important element in introducing this doubt has been the Hittite-Luwian evidence. It is also recognized now that the relation of Latin is not so simple as it once was thought to be. The relation of Celtic is really much more straightforward in detail, but the unravelling of the numerous and superficially dramatic changes in prehistoric Insular Celtic lay far in the future from Sir William's vantage point. The fact that he added the old Persian only as a conditional afterthought reflects only the fact...