This is a podcast from the archives of the BBC Ruth Lectures.

This lecture in the series The Language Web, given by Jean Aitchison, was originally broadcast in 1996.

For centuries, ideas about language origin have frothed up like soap bubbles, then burst into nothing.

Over 2,000 years ago, the Egyptian king Semeticus

reportedly gave instructions

for two newborn children

to be brought up in total isolation.

To his disappointment,

their earliest word was Becos,

the Fridian word for bread.

The king reluctantly concluded

that the Fridians

predated the Egyptians.

But according to John Webb, a 17th century writer,

Chinese was possibly the original language of humankind.

Happily, it was spoken by Noah and his family in the Ark, he assumed,

and so survived the flood.

In the mid-19th century, Abbott O'Donnelly, a

Frenchman, claimed a new and prodigious discovery of the original universal language,

supposedly found on an Egyptian obelisk. His translation, he boasted, was sufficient to open the

eyes of a mole. But no one listened,

he lamented, with his words and results being blown away by the wind. As one weird idea after

...