|Boxhorn, Marcus van|
He was the first to claim that there
was a common ancestral Indo-European language.
(1612 - 1653) A Dutch philologist who taught at the University of Leiden, he was the first to notice similarities in what eventually came to be called the Indo-European languages (e.g. Dutch, Greek, Latin, Persian, and German). He also postulated the existence of a common ancestral language, which he called Scythian — Scythia being antiquity's name for an area north of the Black and Caspian seas. According to modern comparative linguistics, he pretty much got it right.