The Adamic Language, European Nationalism, and the Rise of the Renaissance Comparativism

The analysis is focused on one of the directions of the Adamic project developed in the Renaissance culture and aimed to reconstruct the primordial, or Adamic, language (Ursprache). Adamic was the primordial language belonging to the forefathers (while at least they remained in the condition of the initial perfection). The project presented a complex of ideas and views together with hermeneutic strategies they determined and was based on a specific set of beliefs, presumptions, and attitudes. The set included a humanistic aspiration for “the origins” (ad fontes), deep reverence for “the ancient wisdom” (prisca sapientia) the first people had possessed and expressed in the Ursprache, which had helped it survive in history, and faith for biblical and heathen narratives. It also included Cratylism, according to which lexical meanings (in their pristine form) sprang from the very essence of things due to the predetermined harmony between the structures of language and of the reality. The mentioned elements of the Renaissance thought formed a sort of a system of coordinates; supporters of the analysed strategy worked within it. The system directed them to study the Ursprache via finding its rudiments in known historical tongues (provided that there is a language that has preserved the maximum of the primordial properties). The article argues that, despite the rich variety of forms the strategy was implemented in, means of justification of some tongue’s rights to be taken as the Adamic one or, more often, as its closest derivate were universal at large. They included recourse to a spectrum of mytho-historical narratives current in the Renaissance culture; using them, many Adamicists built new original constructs matching their ideological goals. Besides, the means supposed employment of a vast arsenal of tools of humanistic exegesis and etymology. Particular attention is paid to the Renaissance scholars’ etymological practice, which was to provide them with the properly linguistic evidence of the “Adamic” rights of the languages those humanists promoted. The etymological analysis was typically reduced to searches for elements of Adamic in words of later historical languages and to demonstrations of a non-conventional, organically motivated link conjoining original words with their referents in the world. In order to make this double task easier, some etymologists resorted to fragmentation of words into phonosemantic “atoms” considering monosyllabism to be an essential feature of the primordial language.

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