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:I have restored the status quo ante. What is unique about Jones is his positing of some no-longer existent independent source, Blench's unsourced cavils notwithstanding. Ibn Quraysh does not posit the origin of Hebrew and Arabic in some common and no longer spoken proto-tongue, but attributes Hebrew to the Patriarchs with other's being Arabicized away from God's original Hebrew. The same naive pre-scientific mythological view holds for the Romans. They believed their tongue was a debased form of Greek, not that it and Greek both evolved from some distinct third (proto-) language no longer spoken. [[User:Medeis|μηδείς]] ([[User talk:Medeis|talk]]) 02:59, 16 April 2011 (UTC)
What? Blench's criticism not at all "unsupported" or "vague". By all means, take a look at Jones' remarks in the Third Speech to the Asiatick Society and you will see that the criticism is mostly accurate. For example, Jones explicitly says that Hindustani belongs to a different stock than Sanskrit (unlike Latin, Greek and Persian), and is only influenced by it.
Also, he clearly fails to differentiate between the history of "races" (i.e., ethnic groups) and languages (and even between the history of spoken language and scripts), and often conflates his bizarre speculations about the origins of "races" (i.e. that modern Indians are related to Egyptians, Chinese and even "Peruvians") with his linguistic speculation.
All in all, if you remove that single fortuitious quote on IE, most of Jones' ramblings would be considered nonsense today, and certainly inferior to the contributions of many of his contemporaries or predecessors. The fact that he is so often glorified and quoted has more to do with the fact that he held a prominent position and was a pioneer, than the quality of his work as a scholar. Again, by all means, go and read him, instead of relying on secondary, tertiary, etc. sources.
Finally, his claim of an no longer existent independent source was neither that decisive not definitevely accepted, since several decades later Sanscrit itself was still claimed to be ''the'' IE proto-language, as Schleicher's quote in this very article makes clear. What we really have with Jones is an easily quotable paragraph from a famous scholar of a prestigious institution. Certainly, the fact that he was somehow the "father" of comparative linguistics is an attractive narrative, but hardly accurate.[[User:KelilanK|KelilanK]] ([[User talk:KelilanK|talk]]) 16:12, 16 April 2011 (UTC)
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