The records appear so lately that they include no clue about the origin of language.
For this reason many late scholars in nineteenth century who were only interested in “hard science” neglected and even banned discussions on language origin. In 1886, the Linguistic Society of Paris passed a resolution “outlawing” any paper on the topic.
According to Christian beliefs, God have given Adam the power to name all things. For example, Adam gave “woman” the name “ischa” as he knew that she derived and was a part of man, “isch”. Similar thoughts are found throughout the world. According to the Egyptians, the god Thoth created speech. Babylonians believed that the language giver was the god Nabu. And the Hindus attributed the language ability to a female god Brahma.
Although experiments are still curious on the fist language of mankind, in the fifth century B.C. the Greek historian Herodotus reported that the Egyptian pharaoh Psametichus (664-610 B.C. ) determined the most primitive language by scientific methods. Two children was cared in a mountain hut by a mute servant. They were totally isolated and had no linguistic input. Any word they said was tha original tongue of men. The first word they uttered was “bekos”, the word for bread in Phriygian. Similar tests were done by Holy Roman Emperor Frederic II of Hohenstaufen and James IV of Scotlend .But the no further along today in discovering the original language than was Psammetichus, given the obscurities in the prehistory.
As the Greeks speculated about everything in universe, the earliest surviving linguistic treatise which deals with the origin and nature of language is Plato’s “Cratylus”. Expressed by Socrates in this dialogue, the common Greek view was that at some ancient time there had been a legislator who gave the correct natural names of everything. These names echoed the essence of their meanings.
Despite all the contrary evidence, the idea that the first tongue was imitative or echoic, was proposed up to twentieth century. A parallel view states hat language at first included emotional sounds of pain, fear, surprise, anger and so on.. This proposal that the first words were cries of nature was proposed by Jean Jacques Rousseau in the middle of the eighteenth century.
