author
Rowland Jones
1722–1774
A Welsh lawyer turned bold language theorist, he wrote some of the 18th century’s most unusual books about how words began. His big idea was that Welsh preserved the oldest human language, and he built an entire body of work around it.
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About the author
Born in 1722 in Llanbedrog, Caernarfonshire, Rowland Jones trained in law, worked first in his father's office, and later moved to London. He was admitted to the Inner Temple in 1751, and is often associated with Broom Hall near Pwllheli.
Jones is remembered as a philologist with strikingly original, sometimes radical views. He was described in his own day as an eminent scholar, especially well versed in Latin and Greek, but his most distinctive claim was that Celtic—more specifically Welsh—was the primeval language. In The Origin of Language and Nations (1764), he argued that words could be traced back to simple roots and that several languages shared a common Celtic source.
He went on to publish a series of ambitious works, including Hieroglyfic (1768), The Philosophy of Words (1769), The Circles of Gomer (1771), and The 10 Triads (1773). However unconventional his theories now seem, they were influential in Welsh linguistic thought, including on the later scholar William Owen Pughe. Jones died in London in 1774.