Colonial conquests powered the scientific comparative study of languages.

Evidence

But it was only in the later eighteenth century that the scientific comparative study of languages really got under way. Out of the English conquest of Bengal came William Jones’s pioneering investigations of Sanskrit (1786), which led to a growing realization that Indic civilization was far older than that of Greece or Judaea. Out of Napoléon’s Egyptian expedition came Jean Champollion’s decipherment of hieroglyphics (1835), which pluralized that extra-European antiquity. Advances in Semitics undermined the idea that Hebrew was either uniquely ancient or of divine provenance. Once again, genealogies were being conceived which could only be accommodated by homogeneous, empty time. ‘Language became less of a continuity between an outside power and the human speaker than an internal field created and accomplished by language users among themselves.’ — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 289

Categorization

• XREF: Colonial conquest literally spawning philology shows empire as knowledge-producer — connects to Orientalism’s claim that colonial power generates scholarly disciplines. — connects to: Colonial administrative languages emerged unplanned from pre-existing lingua francas before print capitalism spread them — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on…, 476; Colonial officials used language hierarchy to justify claims of Indigenous mental inferiority; Languages came to be seen as the property of specific national communities — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on…, 345

Related

• Linguistic distinctions were extended to claim ontological differences between peoples (similarity 0.81)
• Colonial language legacies still govern which texts circulate. (similarity 0.80)
• Colonial expansion made alien cultures interpretable in the first place (similarity 0.80)
• Colonial ‘discoveries’ of native origins were projections of colonists’ own notions (similarity 0.79)
• Colonial administration simply could not operate in its own imperial languages (similarity 0.79)
• Colonial and scholarly competition substituted new Oriental origins for the Hebrew Edenic origin (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Colonial officials used language hierarchy to justify claims of Indigenous mental inferiority #expands (0.75)
• Languages came to be seen as the property of specific national communities #expands (0.72) — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 345