Indo-European Vocabulary in Old Chinese. A New Thesis on the mergence of Chinese Language and Civilization in the Late Neolithic Age

In 1786, just over two hundred years ago, comparative historical linguistics was born, when Sir William Jones (1746-1794) discovered the relationship between Old-Indian Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin. Since then, the emerging Indo-European philology has thrown much light on the early history of mankind in Eurasia. 

During the past two hundred years, many suggestions were also made in regard to relationships of Indo-European to other languages such as Semitic, Altaic, Austronesian, Korean etc,, but IndoEuropeanists commonly rejected such attempts for want of convincing evidence. As to Chinese, Joseph Edkins was the first to advance the thesis of its proximity to Indo-European. In his work China’s Place in Philology. An Attempt to show that the Language of Europe and Asia have a Conrmon Origin ( 187 1 ) he presented a number of Chinese words similar to those of Indo-European.