In the seventh Creative Period God rested. Adam and Eve walked and talked with the living and breathing God; an experience few earthborn couples will personally retrace. The experience for each of us, having a personal experience with a walking and talking God is not a reality any more.

In worldly matters, because of our corrupt ways, God allowed the voices of self-serving political surrogates to represent our interests. “We believe in being subjects to kings, presidents, rulers and magistrates, in obeying the, honoring and sustaining the Law.” Conjuring up what Adam and Eve’s language is, is pure and undefiled speculation and misses the point.

This desire to ressurrect an Adamic language is not unlike the effort of King Saul of the ancient Israelites, when he sought assistance from the Witches of Endor, to stem the loss of his power from God, because he wanted to keep his political clout. What passes for language, to day, is proof of the still prevailing corruption, since Eve last spoke with God on earth.

For the rulers or wannabees, language is a marketing tool, i.e. to keep or gain, something made from the dust of the earth, at all cost. They will tell us a thousand lies, so that one lie might be believed. Do they really want a prophet, when they can make their own profit? Before the world, language as a means to communicate a truth is going the way of the Dodo bird, because it is increasingly connected to things that will die.

The power of the lie is not, because it is false, but that the wannabees pay for access to the Media and that there are tens of thousands miserly, deceived humans willing to stand with them, to keep what they got and more. Even as their mind’s eye are dimmed, they would kill for their cause; rather than seek the enlightment that comes from truth.

Eve spoke the TRUTH to the true God and so did Adam. Hence, if I speak TRUTH, I am expressing myself in the language of Adam and Eve.

Edward A. Erdtsieck

This site on feral children has a section on their language development. The link to the Forbidden Experiment talks about the pharaoh legend (which Jonathan refered to) and about Emperor Frederick II and his alleged experiment in 1211 (which Manaen refered to). You’ll find popular info there. Academic studies on the topic of language stimulation in the critical years are of course plenty.

But I did not state this was my “position”. My initial comment was an observation and a hypothetical consideration, which said: “If we could continue higher up, we’d come, theoretically, to the most original form, which we call Adamic… So, theoretically, the Adamic language must have been one of sumptuous expressivity.” In his comments Jonathan reminded us it’s not all that simple.

Still, God and his ontological relation to language remains a Scriptural starting point: “In principio erat Verbum, et Verbum erat apud Deum, et Deus erat Verbum.” Verbum, word, language. And Mormonism is based on the principle of a speaking God.

I’m not a linguist, but let me point out from my own unlearned perspective one apparent logical flaw with your position. You seem to be saying that there’s a general tendency towards simplification over (all?) languages.

Which leads to the question — where did the original complex languages come from in the first place? If things consistently get more simple over time, across the board, then where did complex Latin come from to begin with? I hope that the answer is not “it sprung fully formed from the head of Zeus.”

(I suspect that you have an answer to this question, but I haven’t seen one presented thus far.)

I see no reason to believe that the story ever had a basis in reality. While it’s hard to separate the effects of impoverished linguistic input from brutal deprivation and abuse, in the few tragic cases where something like the experiment has been perpetrated, the result has been profound mental retardation and failure to develop any kind of normal language ability.

Language is just much more than a listing in dictionaries or a thesaurus, which I find very helpful. Language is an ancient communication technology to make someone believe, that a thing of substance, such as a tree is actually what it is. In Genesis Adam and Eve had to interprete the purposes of 2 trees in their own lives and in that of their posterity. Unless a meaning is fully understood, a third party will have an influence far beyond his actual authority.

What gives language its power, especially in our modern world, is not so much the reality of what the truth is, but how many people have the opinion that a thing or idea is true. We have not come very far from the time Cain and Abel were working out their challenges and with the same results.

However, I belief that there is an Adamic quality to language and it is an individual thing. It is what opens the windows of heavens. After all, it was said, that in the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the word was God.

Edward A. Erdtsieck

In your discussion of morphological change, you’re only looking at the destructive processes, but you need to consider the role of grammaticalization, the process through which idiomatic constructions become regularized into morphological markers. Thus at the same time Germanic was losing nominal cases, it was inventing a second system of adjectival inflection, innovating a new type of verb morphology, and installing umlaut at the heart of its verbal morphology like no other Indo-European language had done. The complexity of Latin verbal morophology is also the result of morphological innovation–the imperfect and future aren’t continuations of the Indo-European system (quoting Phillip Baldi’s Foundations of Latin from memory here, so refer to him for details).

Morphological levelling happens constantly and in every language, as in your examples. There’s probably no way to compare simplification and grammaticalization numerically. But they must operate in roughly equal degree, I think, because 1) both are observable in the long-term history of many languages; and 2) otherwise, we would have to assume that all languages in the distant past had an absurdly complex grammatical system.

And a special thanks to Bryce I., whose True Names and Words made Flesh and Words of Power transported me, like the first time I read Lake Isle of Innisfree. I can’t see how it could be true, but its too wonderful not to be.