This barely recognizable version of the Lord's Prayer from about a thousand years ago provides a rather clear indication that the language of the ‘Englisc’ has gone through substantial changes to become the English we use today. Investigating the features of older languages, and the ways in which they developed into modern languages, involves us in the study of language history and change, also known as philology. In the nineteenth century, philology dominated the study of language and one result was the creation of ‘family trees’ to show how languages were related. Before all of that could happen, however, there had to be the ‘discovery’ that a variety of languages spoken in different parts of the world were actually members of the same family.

Family trees

In 1786, a British government official in India called Sir William Jones made the following observation about Sanskrit, the ancient language of Indian law.