I removed this from the main page, since it makes no sense (at least to me):
- (No serious linguist today believes this.)
- However, some groups maintain this belief, especially some in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Joseph Smith, Brigham Young and other early leaders of the Church made statements about the Adamic language.
- The place "Adam-ondi-Ahman?" in Daviess County, Missouri, U.S., is supposedly in the Adamic language.
- See [1]
No serious linguist believes what? That the adamic language is hebrew? That there is an adamic language? Since it rests on the Bible anyway, linguists are in the normal science/faith dilemma, and are going to have to pick a side.
And then again, the mormons believe what? The biblical passage about confounding the languages at the tower? So what?
If you read the article I provided links to, you'll find that Mormons (or at least some Mormons) have unique beliefs that most Christians don't on this issue. Such as that the Adamic language will be widely spoken come the end of the world (i.e. what Ezra Taft Benson had to say), or that words of it was revealed to Joseph Smith, Brigham Young and others, or that it isn't Hebrew, contrary to the beliefs of most other Christians (or at least Christians who believed in an Adamic language, most of which have been dead for centuries now...) -- SJK.
- Good clarification. Good article link, too, although I don't know how useful it is to link to pages containing copyrighted material in Google's cache (caches, by nature, being volatile) from domains which no longer exist...
- Moved to a different site -- just found a really good article from the LDS point of view, explaining their beliefs about the Adamic language. --Dmerrill
How do you pronounce "Pay Lay Ale"? Like the English Words "Pay", "Lay" and "Ale"? It isn't really that clear (I've probably been looking at languages other than English too much...). -- SJK
- Yes, just as the English words are pronounced.
...: I think if you look at 17th or 18th century linguistics you may find some non-Mormon references to an Adamic language, maybe not using that term though. Early linguists believed that Hebrew was the language spoken by Adam, and that at the Tower of Babel God produced the other languages of the world (or their ancestors) out of Hebrew. Even if they didn't call it by the Mormon name (I don't know if they did or didn't), their idea was pretty similar. (The main difference was their belief that the Adamic language was Hebrew, a belief Mormon's don't share.) -- SJK
- I've certainly read about it in non-Mormon contexts. Wasn't it Frederick II who is reputed to have tried to discover the Adamic language experimentally by having two children raised without speech so that they would 'come out' speaking the Adamic language? it's an anecdote whose source escapes me.--MichaelTinkler
- Michael: I've heard a story like that, but I thought it was someone in ancient times, like some ancient Greek king or Egyptian pharaoh or something. The tale I recalled was that two children were raised by shepherds who were not allowed to talk to them. They came out saying "pa pa pa", which was the word in some language X for bread. So the ruler concluded X was the first language. More likely "pa pa pa" was the sound of the sheep. -- SJK
- Yep, Herodotus reports it of Psammetichus of Egypt, but there are lots of late medieval and early modern kings who are reputed to have done it, too, including one of the scottish kings. The later reports are (a) exactly the kind of thing that people who'd read Herodotus might report of later kings reputed to be intellectuals and (b) exactly the kind of thing a king who thought himself an intellectual (like Frederick II) would do. I have no idea what the state of 'evidence' is for it, but it'll get a page of its own, I suppose! 'Human experimentation'?--MichaelTinkler
I believe Herodotus reported the first word to be
bedos, which was Hittite for bread, rather than
papapa. Some Medieval king tried the experiment, but the baby died before it started talking. Which is to me an eminently plausible story, for the Middle Ages.
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