Goropius Becanus, the Adamic language, and the Renaissance Mytholinguistics

The analyses is focused on a linguistic aspect of the cultural and historic theory of Goropius Be-canus, an outstanding humanist of the sixteenth century. A main intention directing Becanus was to substantiate the primordial status and epistemological perfection of his native Dutch and thereby enhance the prestige of his national culture. The author explores the set of beliefs and presumptions underlying the scholar's cultural-historic scheme as well as the modes and means of substantiating "adamicity" of Dutch determined by it. It is argued that the means exploited by Becanus were generally used in the republic of letters for extolling of one or another classical tradition and language: Hebrew, Old Egyptian, Latin etc. Those resources included a spectrum of mythohistoric narratives current in the Renaissance culture. The Dutch scholar assembled them in a new original construct matching his intention. They also included an arsenal of the tools of Humanistic exegesis and etymology enabling him, as he thought, to justify that construct in the eyes of the learned. In the first two sections of this paper the dependence of Becanus' scheme from the basic mytho-genic notions which the contemporary culture proposed maintaining certain mythohistoric narratives is explored. All of those notions were connected with a so called Adamic project. It presented a complex of ideas and hermeneutic strategies determined by them and aimed to reconstruct the primordial, or Adamic, language. Adamic was the primordial language belonging to the protoplasts (while at least they remained in a condition of the initial perfection). Not being (just) an artificial, conventionally imposed semiotic system, this language was thought to be directly correspondent to the intelligible structure of the world, for it was either inherently connected with the very essences of natural things or possessed epistemological excellence allowing to reflect these essences in a perfect manner. Also it is ascertained that Becanus assumed a highly negative attitude towards magical-occultist movement within the Adamic project. And it is cleared up that the ambivalent intellectual renown the scholar had was due to defiant originality of his theory with its central thesis that Dutch is a primordial language sensu stricto. In the third section Becanus' etymological practice is analyzed. It was to provide him and his readers with properly linguistic proofs that his cultural and historic scheme was correct. Typically for the Renaissance mytholinguistics, the practice was reduced to a search for elements of the "Adamic" language in words of latter, historic, ones and to demonstration of a non-contingent, organically motivated link conjoining primordial words with their meaning and then with signified things themselves. In order to make easier this double task Becanus and some of his followers resorted to fragmentation of Dutch words into phonosemantic "atoms" assumed to be pristine.

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