What language did Adam speak?

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What language did Adam speak?

Impossible to know with any exactitude. Some simply call it the Adamic language spoken by Adam and his descendants. They may have even spoken a language that no longer exists today.

These are the statements about the Adamic language and the Tower of Babel as Abrahamic texts, beliefs and traditions show:

  • Adamic was the language spoken by Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Adamic is typically identified with either the language used by God to address Adam, or the language invented by Adam (Book of Genesis 2:19).

  • The Genesis is ambiguous on whether the language of Adam was preserved by Adam’s descendants until the confusion of tongues (Genesis 11:1-9), or if it began to evolve naturally even before Babel (Genesis 10:5), into what is usually called Chaldaic:

Dante in his De Vulgari Eloquentia argues that the Adamic language is of divine origin and therefore unchangeable.

In his Divina Commedia, however, Dante changes his view to the effect that the Adamic language was the product of Adam. This had the consequence that it could not any longer be regarded immutable, and hence Hebrew could not be regarded as identical with the language of Paradise..

  • Also, the nature of that original language remains controversial, interpretations showing many nationalist flavours:

  • Traditional Jewish exegesis such as Midrash (Genesis Rabbah 38) says that Adam spoke Old Hebrew or rather its linguistic ancestor Proto-Canaanite, because the names he gives Eve – “Isha” (Book of Genesis 2:23) and “Chava” (Genesis 3:20) – only make sense in Hebrew. Traditional Christians based on Genesis 10:5 have assumed that the Japhetite, or Indo-European, languages are rather the direct descendants of the Adamic language, having separated before the confusion of tongues, by which also Hebrew was affected.

  • Early Christian fathers claimed that Adam spoke Latin to explain why God would make it the liturgical language of his Church, although “Latin” here would be a loose way of referring to its ancestor, Proto-Italic or older Europe’s Indo-European.

  • Modern traditional Catholics follow Anne Catherine Emmerick’s revelations (1790), which stated that the most direct descendants of the Adamic language were Bactrian, Zend and Indian languages (i.e., the Indo-Iranian languages), associating the Adamic language with the then-recent concept of the “common source” of these tongues, now known as Proto-Indo-European:

This language was the pure Hebrew, or Chaldaic. The first tongue, the mother tongue, spoken by Adam, Shem, and Noah, was different, and it is now extant only in isolated dialects. Its first pure offshoots are the Zend, the sacred tongue of India, and the language of the Bactrians. In those languages, words may be found exactly similar to the Low German of my native place.

Many Muslim scholars, following the traditional Jewish identification of Pre-Hebrew as the Adamic language, hence classified within the Semitic language family (which includes the Ge’ez language used in the Book of Enoch), claim that Pre-Arabic – hence Proto-(West-)Semitic – is the original Adamic language. Most of them do not believe the Semitic languages were the direct descendants of the Adamic language, but rather trace them back to Abraham, instead of Noah and Adam.

From Adamic or the language of the Garden of Eden until the Tower of Babel: the confusion of tongues and the earliest dialects attested

What was the language of Adam according to Islam?

Interestingly the Zend language is akin to Sanskrit and either could possibly be the language of Adam in the Revelations of Catherine Emmerich are allowed to take there course.

To the question of where the Prophet Mountain and the Garden of Eden are, (Which mountain is the “Prophet Mountain” that Anne Catherine Emmerich mentions in her writings?), I postulated that they somewhere in the Himalayas according to Blessed Catherine Emmerich.

What language is the world’s oldest language?

But do you know which is the oldest language in the world? If you are not aware of the answer to this question then after reading this article you will know which is the oldest language in the world, because in this article we are giving the details of the 10 oldest languages ​​of the world according to the origin.

  1. Tamil Language

The Tamil language is recognized as the oldest language in the world and it is the oldest language of the Dravidian family. This language had a presence even around 5,000 years ago. According to a survey, 1863 newspapers are published in the Tamil language only every day. At present, the number of speakers of Tamil language is around 7.7 crores. This language is spoken in India, Sri Lanka, Singapore and Malaysia.

  1. Sanskrit Language

World’s oldest language is Sanskrit. The Sanskrit language is called Devbhasha. All European languages ​​seem inspired by Sanskrit. All the universities and educational institutions spread across the world consider Sanskrit as the most ancient language. It is believed that all the languages ​​of the world have originated from Sanskrit somewhere. The Sanskrit language has been spoken since 5,000 years before Christ. Sanskrit is still the official language of India. However, in the present time, Sanskrit has become a language of worship and ritual instead of the language of speech. All the auspicious works performed in Hindu religion are recited by Veda Mantra, whose language is Sanskrit.

Thus it may be possible that Adam originally spoke a dialect of Sanskrit or Zend as Catherine Emmerich implies. Adam (Admi)in Sanskrit (आदम)) means "The first or most ancient man".

The following articles may be of interest to some:

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The Bible does not explicitly state what language Adam and Eve spoke, but some of the details in the Bible allow us to determine what it may have been.

For example, if we accept the following tenets

  1. As there was a mere 9 generations between Adam and Noah, it is likely that the language spoken by Adam was spoken by Noah and his family as well. This same language would have remained as the sole language until the confusion at Babel.
  2. The Bible does not indicate that all humans were involved in the rebellion in Babel at the time of the confusion. Those of Noah's descendants who were not there would have retained their original language.
  3. God would have chosen as Jesus' ancestors people who were approved by him.

Genesis 10:21-25 tells us that Noah's son Shem was an ancestor to Eber. Eber is generally viewed as the ancestor of the Hebrew-speaking peoples, although this does not necessarily mean that the descendants were solely Hebrew-speaking.

According to Genesis 10:25, Eber had two sons, one of whom was named Peleg because during his time the earth was "divided". This may be a reference to the confusion of languages of those who were in Babel.

Luke 3:35 lists Peleg and Eber as ancestors of Jesus. From this we could hold the view that they were not involved in the project at Babel and would thus have retained the language they had. Based on this the original language would have been something similar to ancient Hebrew.

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