National language myths

Writing in the fifth century bce, Herodotus (History 2:2) recounts how Pharoah Psammetichus of Egypt had set out to discover the original language of mankind by ordering that two children should be raised in isolation by a shepherd, who was forbidden to speak to them. After two years, the children’s first word was similar to bekos, the Phrygian word for bread, from which the Pharoah was forced to conclude that the Phrygians, and not the Egyptians, were the most ancient people.

As Robins (1997: 153) points out, this tale has been recast with many different outcomes, revealing how the search for an ‘original’ language is often suffused with nationalist ideology. The ‘language of Adam’ has at various times been equated with Greek, Latin or Hebrew, and a real or imagined association with an ancient language has often been spuriously advanced to promote the cause of a contemporary one. A treatise published in 1569 by the Dutch scholar Goropius Becanus, for example, argued that the oldest language was Cimmerian, traces of which, he claimed, could be found in the Brabantic Dutch dialect. In the same year, Henri Estienne published an impassioned defence of the French language, at that time emerging as a serious rival to Latin in France and a competitor, notably with Italian, for international prestige, on the grounds of it being allegedly closer to ancient Greek than other European languages.