Why would you enter a thread about the language Adam and Eve spoke and then be arbitrarily derisive of theology? Did I not tell you how proud I am that you accomplished getting your linguistics degree? I don’t understand why you are being competitive honestly.
<shrugs> I’ve heard it used a fair bit. An example of its use wrt Semitic languages would be that the emphatic series of consonants are a primitive feature, retained (with some modifications) in Arabic but lost in modern Hebrew.
He’s not being derisive towards theology, he’s being derisive towards your rather incoherent response to a point regarding linguistics. And the sefirot have nothing to do with linguistics (or anything else, really, for that matter).
Before this runs off the rails, I hope that everyone notes that yBeafy noted primitive features and not primitive languages. Had there been a reference to a “primitive” language, I would find it uninformative and distracting, (and wrong, of course), but I have also heard languages and dialects mentioned as carrying primitive features within language groups. His original comment simply noted that within the entire Semitic language group, some languages such as Arabic continue to use earlier/more primitive features, not that Arabic (or any other language) was more primitive than any other.
I wonder if there was ever a human who spoke a Neanderthal language/dialect or if early Homo Sapien’s and Neanderthal’s proto languages shared any roots (assuming that Neanderthal had language, of course.)?
I’ve always thought it funny imagining that there were probably ‘cavemen translators’ that had spent time among the Neanderthals and acted as a go between when they coexisted peacefully. I bet quite a few ‘cavemen’ were multilingual considering nomadicism and humanity’s tendency toward assimilation for survival.
Exactly.
Thanks also to Tom for his expansion regarding the use of primitive. An interesting thing to note, though, is that a proto-language may have features that the current language does not; however, later that language may pick up those features again, such as inflections.
You’re right, the Sefer Yetzirah a book about the language of creation has no basis in this discussion whatsoever, what could I possibly have been thinking? We’ve got to get down to the serious SCIENCE!!! of what language Adam and Eve spoke!
I’ll try not to be so stupid next time.
Erek
If the Sefer Yetzirah says that Hebrew was the first language, then it is wrong. There are written records of languages long before Hebrew came on the scene, and Hebrew is demonstrably not the ancestor of any other known language. Whatever language Adam and Eve spoke, it was not Hebrew.
Thanks. I appreciate it.
Please refresh my memory.
Just noticed that you answered my (uninformed) quibble. Thanks for the explanation/edification. I’d never have figured that out on my own. (As jargon goes, though, I have to say I find it an unfortunate choice. Imagine if evolutionary biologists started using the term “primitive” to mean ancestral. 
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