On February 1-2, 1986, an international seminar on 'Indo- European Linguistics' was held at the Asiatic Society of Cal- cutta. The present volume, Essays on Indo-European Linguis tics, is the outcome of that seminar.

This seminar was organized in order to commemorate the prophetic pronouncement of Sir William Jones, who, two hundred years ago on this very day, had made a statement at Calcutta about the similarity of Sanskrit with Greek, Latin, Gothic, Celtic and Old Persian. This utterance of Jones is reckoned in the history of IE linguistics as the birth-date of Comparative Philology or Historical Linguistics. That is the reason why the seminar was held on 1 and 2 February 1986 at Calcutta. The purpose of this seminar is to take into ac- count the researches done during these years and to fathom the depth of the progress of IE linguistics. In order to achieve this desired object in view, some foreign scholars from America, England, Germany and other countries were invited to pay homage to the announcement of Sir William Jones by way of surveying the researches on IE linguistics done during the past two centuries. Out of these foreign invitees only Professors Edgar C. Polome', Eric P. Hamp, George Cardona, J. C. Wright, Werner Winter, Wolfgang Meid, and R. S. P. Beekes attended the seminar and presented their valuable papers. From Calcutta Professor Sukumar Sen attended and presented his paper. There were eight persons in all who presented their learned papers in the seminar.