My husband, Michael Franklin, who has died aged 74, was a biographer of the Welsh polymath Sir William Jones (1746–94), whose insight into the idea that Indo-European languages were interrelated first inspired comparative linguistics.
Jones was a puzzle: a colonial administrator in India but a radical pamphleteer at home. In Orientalist Jones: Sir William Jones, Poet, Lawyer, and Linguist, 1746–1794 (2011), Michael took an empathetic approach yet never minimised his subject’s desire for wealth and power through the East India Company.
