A sixteenth-century Christian Hebraist argued that Phrygian was the first human language
Evidence
- See I. Christie-Miller, “A Critical Analysis Of Jean Thenaud’s Kabbalistic Manuscript Arsenal 5061” (Ph. D. diss., London University, 1997), which deals with the sixteenth-century French Christian Hebraist Jean Thenaud. The thesis describes the latter’s work La Margerite, which argues that Phrygian was the first language. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 925
Categorization
- QUESTION: Why Phrygian specifically? This connects to the myth of the Phrygian king Gordias and to early-modern debates about linguistic primacy and the pre-Babel state.
- SHARE: Echoes the Herodotus Psammetichus experiment where a child’s first word was ‘bekos’ (Phrygian for bread) — a person deep in early-modern philology or the history of the Tower of Babel myth would enjoy this.
- XREF: connects to: Gesture, not speech, may have been humanity’s first language — Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 632