Many historical translators believe all human languages descended from the Garden of Eden.
Adam and Eve Photo: www.answersfrommen.com
Scholars across the globe once believed that all human languages were handed down from the language of Adam and Eve, a language referred to as Adamic.
“In the Sanskrit Language (1786), Sir William Jones proposed that Sanskrit and Persian had resemblances to classical Greek, Latin, Gothic and Celtic languages. From this idea sprang the field of comparative historical linguistics. Through the 19th century, European linguistics centered on the comparative history of the Indo-European languages, with a concern for finding their common roots and tracing their development.”
Operating from a biblical vantage point, some intellectuals accepted as truth that all human languages were the progeny of the language of Adam and Eve’s Adamic Language. Many of these learned men believed that the Hebrew Language was, in fact, the same as the Adamic Language. In the early 19th century, Wilhelm von Humboldt theorized that human language was a rule-governed system, adopting a hypothesis that was to be the locus of all formal studies on the syntax and semantics of language in the 20th century. Of this proposition, he said that it allowed language to make infinite use of finite means (Uber den Dualis 1827).
Toward the end of the 19th century, scholars in the United States undertook the recording of hundreds of native languages once found in North America. The interest in describing languages spread across the globe, resulting in thousands of international languages having now been analyzed to varying degrees. As this work evolved during the early 20th century primarily in America, linguists came up against languages whose structures varied greatly from those of traditional European languages.
Language scholars concluded that they needed a theory of linguistic structure and methods of analysis.
What language do you think is the most structurally different from English? Basque? Arabic? Chinese? What about their structure makes them so different from our own?
Christine Prantil
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