There are many mundane things beyond the reach of present human knowledge and the site of Eden and the language of our first parents are among the number. Some philologists have ventured the conjecture that the primeval language must have been a simple vocabulary whose formation is indicated in Gen. 2:19, and which was strictly limited to the natural requirements of our first progenitors; in other words, signs and sounds apprehensible by the senses. All agree that speech, or the power of expressing emotions, or desires, was coeval with the creation of man. The earliest monuments and inscriptions yet discovered do not reach as far back into antiquity as the confusion of tongues at Babel (about B.C. 2200), previous to which (Gen. 2:1), the Biblical record states that "the whole earth was of one language and one speech," although probably there were many variations and dialects, each containing some element of the original tongue. Man's first utterances were probably what philologists term a "physical language," limited to the expression of simple needs and afterwards expanded to meet man's growing experience with his own nature and the world around him.
