Editor’s note: Welcome to InDepthNH.org’s column Speaking of Words. Michael Ferber retired from the English Department at UNH, but has plenty more to say and write about words. We are thrilled he wants to do that for our readers. Welcome Michael! 

Speaking of Words
By MICHAEL FERBER

          The answer to this question used to be obvious to most Christians and Jews: It was Hebrew, the language spoken by Adam and Eve.  The Book of Genesis, however, doesn’t actually say so, though the book itself is written in Hebrew, and quotes both Adam and Eve speaking it.

  They were created knowing some language or other, apparently, but the odd thing is that God seemed not to know it, or not very well, for after he created Adam he brought all the beasts and birds to him “to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof.”

  This was perhaps a way of devolving sovereign power onto Adam, who was to be the ruler of all living things, but it is puzzling that God seems not to know the names of them in advance.  God could speak to Adam and Eve when he expelled them from the Garden, and centuries later he could write Hebrew on the tablets of the law, so presumably it was Hebrew all along, and God just hadn’t bothered to find Hebrew names for the creatures; that was Adam’s job.

  Or maybe God had his own language with names for everything, just as the gods in Homer had a name for some things different from the names mortals had for them, but then who would God have spoken to before he created anyone?  These are deep mysteries.

          At any rate, for centuries European scholars beat their brains to prove in mighty tomes that Greek and Latin and English were derived from Hebrew, not to mention Persian and Sanskrit and Chinese as they became known to the west.  All these volumes make pathetic but often hilarious reading today, and no known rules of historical linguistics can make sense of them.  So, with historical linguistics now a sophisticated science, can it tell us what the oldest language is?

          No.  For one thing, you can make a case that all languages are equally old, except for artificial languages such as Esperanto, because they all go back to the ur-language of the human race, spoken in Africa perhaps 75,000 years ago.  That assumes, of course, that language arose only once in human pre-history, perhaps by means of a leap caused by one or two mutations in the genome that linked certain mental faculties and oral sounds into a new skill.

  That is quite an assumption, but you can defend it on Darwinian grounds: a group of people who had a fully fledged language would have an advantage over other groups who had only some sort of “proto-language” and would out-compete them over thousands of years and thousands of miles.

  There are no primitive or proto-languages today, as far as we know: all natural languages have rich and complicated syntactic rules that allow a virtually infinite variety of sentences, and they are based on a small set of meaningful sounds or “phonemes.”  The language faculty has been a great success.  We might then imagine the 7000 languages of the world (a very approximate number) as branches on a great tree planted 75,000 years ago, with the dead or extinct languages (Sumerian, Etruscan, Hittite, and many more) lopped off it.

          But that model, based on the evolutionary tree of life, wouldn’t fully capture the history of languages even if there were a single origin.  Some languages are blends or hybrids.  Pidgins, for example, are created by mixing bits from at least two languages so that basic communication can take place; richer hybrids called creoles may arise from pidgins when children adopt them, though there is some debate about this.

  English is a blend of a kind, if not exactly a creole: the West Germanic dialect we call Old English was overlaid by Norman French after 1066 and a very different language, or set of dialects, emerged soon after.  So what we call English might be considered very young, dating to about 1200 CE. 

          By the same token, what we call French or Italian or Spanish are only a little older.  They all go back to Latin spoken about 100 BCE.  But if we called them different dialects of modern Latin, they would look quite a bit older.  If we called them dialects of Indo-European, along with Greek, Russian, Irish, and Hindi, they would go back to about 3000 BCE.  And now there is new evidence that Proto-Indo-European was itself a hybrid, as its speakers were a hybrid, of a Caucasian language and an eastern steppe language from somewhere near Mongolia.

          The moral of all this branching and blending is that naming an oldest language runs into intractable problems, but that it is plausible to claim that all natural languages have a common ancestry.

          We can without much debate settle which is the oldest language to be put in writing: Sumerian, about 3400 BCE, followed by Egyptian, about 3200.  New discoveries might reopen the question, but those two seem to be the first.  (Sumerian has been extinct for millennia, while Egyptian survives as Coptic, the liturgical language of the Coptic Churches.)  Another question is sometimes asked: Which language is the oldest in Europe?  Well, again, they are all equally old, except maybe the hybrids.

  But if the question is about which language has been spoken in Europe the longest, then the answer is probably Basque.  Basque, spoken in the western Pyrenees in both Spain and France, seems to be unrelated to any other known language, though of course there are lots of theories.  The Basques were once thought to be descendants of the Cro-Magnon people, the first modern humans in Europe, and therefore indigenous for tens of thousands of years, but recent DNA studies point to a much more recent migration.

  Still, their ancestors almost certainly arrived well before the Indo-Europeans did, or the much later Hungarians and Finns.  There had been people in Europe for millennia before the Basques, but the languages they spoke are extinct. 

          So the next time you are sunning yourself on the beaches of Biarritz or looking at art in the Guggenheim in Bilbao, take a moment to salute the language of those placenames.  It is very old.

          I am happy to hear from readers with questions or comments: mferber@unh.edu.