A judge in colonial India noticed Sanskrit, Greek and Latin were secretly related

In an address to the Asiatic Society in 1786, judge and scholar Sir William Jones observed that Sanskrit bore a resemblance to Greek and Latin 'too strong to have been produced by accident,' and proposed that all three, along with several other language families, had sprung from a shared common source. His lecture is widely credited with founding comparative linguistics and the modern search for Proto-Indo-European.

— Sir William Jones, The Third Anniversary Discourse, on the Hindus — Delivered 1786, published 1788 — public domain