Before the nineteenth... «The Unfolding Of Language»

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  sarcastronaut

  15 сентября 2016

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  Before the nineteenth century, musing about the history of languages and the relationships between them was the pastime of dilettanti, who often had rather rusty axes to grind. In 1690, for instance, a certain Pere Louis Thomassin wrote in all seriousness that French and Hebrew were so close to each other that 'one may truthfully say that, basically, they are no other than one and the same language'. Even as late as 1765, well into the enlightened eighteenth century, the article on 'language' in Diderot's respected Encyclopedie affirmed that French was closely related to Hebrew. The linguists of the time were thus not much more advanced than the Madame from Versailles, who was overheard by Voltaire as saying: 'What a dreadful pity that the bother at the Tower of Babel should have got language all mixed up; but for that, everyone would always have spoken French.'

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