University and Church

[Swaminathan Madhuresan]

Lars Martin Fosse wrote:
> This sounds like a very American phenomenon. I grew up in the Norwegian
> Bible belt, but no one ever claimed as far as I can remember that
> Hebrew was mankind's first language. (The Bible of course says so, but most
> modern Christians realize that they are dealing with a myth and not with
>history).

Don't know whether the Bible says Hebrew as mankind's first language.
But definitely there was a big movement among European intelligentsia
to deny Hebrew as the first language by IE scholars of Europe once the
European and Sanskrit connection was established.

Maurice Olender, The Languages of Paradise: Race, Religion, and Philology
in the Nineteenth Century, Harvard University Press, 1992.

In the Foreword (p.vii) starts:
"Where was Paradise? In what blessed region of the world did God place
the Garden of Eden, and what language did Adam and Eve speak when they
lived there? Did the first couple, at the dawn of history, converse in
*Hebrew*, as Saint Augustine quite naturally assumed? Or, should we,
as Leibnitz believed, look for a more primitive idiom, the language of the
Scythian continent, supposedly the root of the various languages spoken by
the so-called Indo-European peoples and thus, in the eyes of scholars,
the original speech of humankind?"

Augustine (354-430 CE) held that Hebrew was the first language.
Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803) went for Sanskrit from
the heights of Indian mountains and, he said Ganges is the river
of Paradise. Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913) rejected Hebrew
and went for Aryan. Augustine's view on the centrality of Hebrew
was shattered by the IE data and, 19th century saw the raising
of sanskrit in European mind. Wide ramifications followed.

Hegel, Reason in History, 1830
"The pretension takes up again the old notion of a primary,
paradisaical state of man, which the theologians had elaborated
after their fashion by asserting, for example, that God had spoken
with Adam in Hebrew."

p. x
"These myths were steeped in erudition, informed by profound knowledge
of Hebrew and Sanskrit, fortified by comparative study of linguistic data,
mythology, and religion. .... As scholars established the disciplines of
Semitic and Indo-European studies, they also invented the mythical figures
of the Hebrew and the Aryan, a providential pair which, by revealing to the
people of the Christianized West the secret of their identity, also bestowed
upon them the patent of nobility that justified their spiritual, religious,
and political domination of the world."

Like Tom Trautmann's great book on Aryans and the British, Maurice's
book also deserves a wider audience and deep study.


David Salmon wrote:
<<<
No doubt some ignoramus would assume so, and has at one time or another, but
 I fail to see why ignorance should be seen as a "very American" trait.
 Kindly cite your source.  :-)   Actually, it--this language theory--sounds
 Indian in origin.  I -have- heard it asserted by some (Pakistani) Muslims
 that Arabic is God's language, and Michael Witzel recently reviewed a book
 by Dr. Madhusudan Mishra which purports to show the development of the holy
 Vedic language from primitive utterances in a Sarasvati-based Eden, "They
 were godly people who spoke little words with profound meaning."  Or prehaps
 the assumption that our gods are just like us is a more universal
 phenomenon.
>>>

  Usually European ideas reach Indian subcontinent after a time lag.

Yours,
SM


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