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Suggestions of similarities between Indian and European languages began to be made by European visitors to India in the 16th century. In 1583 Thomas Stephens, an English Jesuit missionary in Goa, noted similarities between Indian languages, specifically Konkani, and Greek and Latin. These observations were included in a letter to his brother which was not published until the twentieth century.[1]
The first account to mention Sanskrit came from Filippo Sassetti (born in Florence, Italy in 1540 AD), a Florentine merchant who traveled to the Indian subcontinent and was among the first European observers to study the ancient Indian language, Sanskrit. Writing in 1585, he noted some word similarities between Sanskrit and Italian (e.g. deva?/dio 'God', sarpa?/serpe 'snake', sapta/sette 'seven', a??a/otto 'eight', nava/nove 'nine').[1] However, neither Stephens' nor Sassetti's observations led to further scholarly inquiry.[1]
In 1647 Dutch linguist and scholar Marcus Zuerius van Boxhorn noted the similarity among Indo-European languages, and supposed the existence of a primitive common language which he called "Scythian". He included in his hypothesis Dutch, Greek, Latin, Persian, and German, later adding Slavic, Celtic and Baltic languages. However, the suggestions of Van Boxhorn did not become widely known and did not stimulate further research.
The hypothesis re-appeared in 1786 when Sir William Jones first lectured on similarities between four of the oldest languages known in his time: Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, and Persian. It was Thomas Young who first used the term Indo-European in 1813[2], which became the standard scientific term (except in Germany[3]) through the work of Franz Bopp, whose systematic comparison of these and other old languages supported the theory. Bopp's Comparative Grammar, appearing between 1833 and 1852, counts as the starting-point of Indo-European studies as an academic discipline.
