Before and after Babel

The origin of language is one of the riddles of mankind. History begins with languages already formed, the intricate relics of vanished civilisations.

As history progresses, so languages deteriorate. Latin and Sanscrit are richer and more expressive than any of their living successors. As Adam Smith wrote in his beautiful essay of 1761, Considerations concerning the first Formation of Languages, the breakdown of the Latin inflexions left Romance languages that were wordy, unpleasing to the ear and rigid in their word order. Amaveram decayed into ego habebam amatum and then io aveva amato.

The God of Genesis created different languages to thwart the insolence of humanity. As an explanation of the origin of linguistic diversity, the Tower of Babel is as convincing as anything since. Eighteenth-century philologists looked to the new science of geology and resolved that the only way to understand the deep past was to study the present. Languages, like the strata James Hutton examined at Siccar Point in Berwickshire, were continuously being wasted away by aeonian processes of erosion and deposition that were visible in the present and had surely operated in the past.

In 1786, Sir William Jones told the Asiatic Society of Calcutta that Sanscrit bore such a close affinity to Latin and Greek ‘that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists’. His conjectural language, now known as Proto-Indo-European, and its sister Proto-Semitic, are as real to philologists as Geordie.

Guy Deutscher, a young Israeli scholar now teaching in the Netherlands, begins with the historical period. He suggests ways that habits of everyday speech might have demolished the old Latin case system or given rise to the tense and person markers in French.