Chapter 1 The Beginnings of Language and Language Origins The history of enquiry into language origins shows how the emergence of language was regarded as a key issue from the earliest times – one that is crucial for understanding of what makes us human. Interest in the gen- esis of language is universal – it appears in various cultural and histor- ical periods, inspiring thinkers to construct scenarios of language creation based on contemporary evidence and ideas. In addition to emphasising the element of universality, this line of enquiry provides inspiration for con- temporary researchers: questions posed in the distant past continue to at- tract the attention of scholars. These include, for example, whether in the initial phase of its development, language imitated the sounds of nature or what the original modality of language was. Our reconstruction also has another, equally important goal, which is to raise awareness of the qual- itative difference between speculations about the beginnings of language in even the recent past, and the strictly scientific approach adopted by the contemporary research on language evolution, the modern field of knowl- edge that deals with the problem of language origins. This chapter is divided into two parts. In Section 1.1, “Religious beginnings”, we discuss religious reflections on the beginnings of language, particularly the divine origin of language. Drawing on examples from both the occidental Christian and Jewish traditions, as well as that of India, we illustrate the universality of ideas about the origins of language and its diversification. Section 2.1, “Glottogenetic thought”, is devoted to natu- ralistic scenarios of the emergence of language, which were formulated by European thinkers with the advent of the modern era. 1.1 Religious beginnings Reflection on the origin of language has always been present in thinking about what makes us human. The intellectual historian José Ignacio Cabezón notes that the problem of language is an important motif in reli- gious discourse. Firstly, religious thinkers are interested in language as a medium of revelation, and the typical outlet of these investigations are the Przemysaw ywiczyski and Sawomir Wacewicz - 9783631790229 Downloaded from PubFactory at 09/25/2021 04:27:06AM via free access 18 The Beginnings of Language and Language Origins conceptions of its divine origin (Cabezón, 1994). The Vedic doctrine of the deification of language (Sanskrit: vāc) or the biblical story of language diversification (Genesis 11: 1–9) are perhaps the best-known attempts in the history of religions to reflect on the nature of language and its origin. The next stage of religious reflection on language, which Cabezón calls “the scholastic phase”, focuses primarily on language itself: scholars are grad- ually becoming aware of the complicated relationship between language and the reality, which leads to questions about the ontological and epis- temological status of language description. Moving these considerations to a more theoretical plane enabled the formulation of more philosoph- ically oriented views on language. In medieval thought, the dispute over universals, or general ideas, led to the demarcation of basic positions in reflections on meaning, such as realism, conceptualism, and nominalism. However, theories of meaning were also formulated in India, where the plane of debate was delimited on the one hand by the naturalistic concept of language created by Vedic orthodoxies from the mīmāṃsā school, and on the other, by the anti-essentialist (conventionalist) doctrine of apoha proposed by Buddhist scholars from the pramana school. 1.1.1 On the divinity of language, the forbidden experiment, and the Adamic language When it comes to religious discussions that may be valuable to studying the origin of language, attention should be paid to the problem of the innate- ness of language and the nature of linguistic meaning. In a monograph on the evolution of language, Tecumseh Fitch (2010: 390) quotes the famous verses from Genesis (2: 18–20): Now the Lord God had formed out of the ground all the beasts of the field and all the birds of the air. He brought them to the man to see what he would name them; and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name. So the man gave names to all the livestock, the birds of the air and all the beasts of the field. But for Adam no suitable helper was found. Fitch argues that since God did not know how Adam is going to name animals, the biblical author favours the arbitrary Saussurean notion of meaning. Such a definitive statement, without reference to the historical and philosophical context, carries the risk of simplifying the issue, which Przemysaw ywiczyski and Sawomir Wacewicz - 9783631790229 Downloaded from PubFactory at 09/25/2021 04:27:06AM via free access Religious beginnings 19 in the theological traditions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam is known as the problem of the Adamic language (see e.g. Eco, 1995). For example, explanations referring to the Jewish tradition of midrash3 state that God bestowed a language upon Adam. This language was Hebrew. Such a con- viction of the innateness of language, in this case Hebrew, was also very strong among medieval Christian thinkers, many of whom believed that a child left unattended would naturally speak Hebrew. There was a cruel, quasi-experimental procedure to test this hypothesis, which goes back to antiquity. The test, later referred to as the Forbidden Experiment, involves isolating the child from language stimuli (Shattuck, 1994: 41–46). Probably the most extensive “experiment” of this type was that commissioned by the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II (1194–1250), who deprived an entire orphanage of contact with language (Shattuck, 1994: 41–46). The chronicler Salimbene reported that the imperial experiment failed, resulting in death of the orphans (see, for example, Coulton, 1906: 242–243 or Benzaquen, 2006: 111). A major figure who contributed to the emergence of non-mythological reflections on language and its origins in Europe was Dante Alighieri (1265–1321). In his magnum opus The Divine Comedy, Dante discusses the problems of changeability and arbitrariness that would begin to characterise language after Adam’s fall. Hebrew, argues Dante, cannot be the language that Adam spoke in paradise, but rather a language that emerged from that spoken in Paradise even before the construction of the Tower of Babel: The language I did use Was worn away, or ever Nimrod’s race Their unaccomplishable work began (Dante, The Divine Comedy, Paradise, Canto XXVI, 124–126) The poet, probably influenced by Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274), introduces a naturalistic element, expressing the conviction that while the shape of a given language is the result of historical influences, linguistic ability itself is innate to all people: 3 A rabbinic Judaic method of explaining the Hebrew Bible (Tenach) with the help of sentences and parables (see Rosik and Rapoport Introduction to the Jewish literature and exegesis of the biblical and rabbinic period, 2009: 318). Przemysaw ywiczyski and Sawomir Wacewicz - 9783631790229 Downloaded from PubFactory at 09/25/2021 04:27:06AM via free access 20 The Beginnings of Language and Language Origins That he speaks, Is nature’s prompting: whether thus, or thus, She leaves to you, as ye do most affect it. (Dante, The Divine Comedy, Paradise, Canto XXVI, 130–133) 1.1.2 Language as the object of investigation The growing interest in the problem of language-to-world relations is characteristic of medieval thought. It became evident in the centuries-long debate about universals (i.e., general concepts) and the meaning of the names referring to them. In this intellectual climate, the biblical story of the origins of language was no longer taken literally. Alongside, there was a growth in the popularity of theological discussions concerning “the veil of language” – the belief that language conceals the true nature of reality. Among Christian thinkers, the most influential discussion of this problem comes from Augustine (354–430), who expresses the view that after the fall of Adam, cognition based on linguistic description is deceptive (De Doctrina Christian, cf. Fyler, 2010). Augustine, referring to philosophical solutions originating primarily from the Stoics, proposes a version of lin- guistic scepticism, the source of which is the belief that after Adam’s fall, there was a permanent break between the word (signum) and the thing that it relates to (res) in language. Furthermore, in language itself, there is a gap between a word as a mental entity (verbum) and its external articu- lation (vox, locutio), and consequently linguistic communication is indirect (it only guides language users to mental content), and unreliable (because the mental content differs from user to user) De( Trinitate, cf. Ferretter, 1998: 261–264). Augustine’s tendency to treat the biblical story in philosophical rather than historical terms was representative of both Christian and Jewish the- ology of late antiquity and the Middle Ages, a tendency which Muslim thinkers joined later (Reeves, 2014). In this intellectual tradition, whose origins can be traced to Philo of Alexandria (10 BC–40 AD), Adam’s fall and the confusion of languages symbolise cognitive and communicative degeneration: man separated from God lives in a world of his own imagi- nation and, owing to the imperfections of language, is never able to express himself in a full and unambiguous way (Reeves, 2014). Przemysaw ywiczyski and Sawomir Wacewicz - 9783631790229 Downloaded from PubFactory at 09/25/2021 04:27:06AM via free access Religious beginnings 21 Such reflections have created an environment in which medieval scholars abandoned issues relating to the origin and the original form of the Adamic language in favour of discussions about how language relates to the world or the mind. As already mentioned, Augustine’s concept of the veil of language gave rise to scepticism (see e.g.