We've all heard of the tower of Babel, but what of the origins of linguistic research? Herodotus offers perhaps the first recorded example of this fine art in his tale of the Egyptian king Psammetichus. The king, fascinated by the origins of civilisation, decreed that two "ordinary" children should be raised without any exposure to human language in order to reveal the very first words invented by mankind. Lo and behold, after two years of babble, the children suddenly cried out "Bekos!", the Phrygian word for bread. Phrygian was thus determined to be the world's first language.
Nowadays we tell more scientific stories—focusing, in the west, on the widely evidenced but lamentably unrecorded Proto-Indo-European tongue, thought to have been spoken 5,000 or more years ago. English, one of its distant descendants, has only existed for 1,500 years, yet we can trace some modern words throughout these. Perhaps the oldest is "town," recorded from 601-603 AD, followed by "priest" (601-604), "earl" (616) and "ward" (680). All are hierarchical terms, reflecting ownership and authority—structures sufficiently engrained to survive a millennium and a half of invasion, growth and linguistic influx.
Embodying a very different continuity are those terms that describe our relationship with nature. "Wood" and "yoke" pre-date the 9th century, as do "summer," "stream," "hill" and animal names like "wolf," "hare" and "cow." It is among such terms, moreover, that we may glimpse some of the very first words. The archaic Egyptian term for a sheep, ba, is over 4,000 years old, but remains a familiar onomatopoeia. Sadly for students of zoological etymology, however, there are no surviving ancient words that correspond to either "woof" or "moo."
