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The last episode introduced the third of the language experiments in this miniseries, this time, according to a rumour being repeated by Robert Lindsay of Pitscottie, carried out by James IV of Scotland, on Inchkeith, an uninhabited island in the Firth of Forth, in Southeastern Scotland, between Edinburgh and Fife. The result Pitscottie reports is that the children in question, raised without any exposure to language, ended up able to speak Hebrew.

To address the pressing question of why this bizarre result might have seemed plausible to someone in the 16th century, in the time between the reign of James IV and Pitscottie publishing his History and Chronicles of Scotland in 1575, we have to leave Scotland for most of this episode, and return southwards, back to Italy, now in the midst of the Renaissance.

The Renaissance was characterised largely by an increased interest in Ancient Civilisations, particularly Greece and Rome, and efforts to better understand their languages. The style of Latin that had developed as an academic lingua franca in Medieval Europe (and is relatively easy to read) came to be regarded as clumsy and inelegant, and humanists started trying to imitate the styles of Roman writers such as Cicero (who, obviously, unlike Medieval writers, spoke Latin natively), producing something much more sophisticated and less easy to understand. It also became fashionable to learn Ancient Greek, something that westerners had rarely done during the Middle Ages, and that was helped by an influx of Greek scholars to Italy as refugees from Ottoman conquests.

And another of these ancient languages that the Renaissance kicked off an increased interest in was Hebrew. Like Greek, it had been largely ignored by Medieval Western Christians, despite its significance as the original language of the Old Testament, and the already widespread belief that it was the original language spoken by Adam, that survived the Tower of Babel. There were strange beliefs and superstitions surrounding the Hebrew language, and occasionally formulas written in Hebrew appeared on magical amulets and in spells (and of course this was all tied up with the utterly bizarre things Medieval Christians believed about Judaism, associating Judaism and the Hebrew language with sorcery and the Devil), but there was very little in the way of serious study of the language by Christians.

Obviously there was in fact at the same time already a well-established tradition of studying the Hebrew language, going back centuries, but throughout the Middle ages this had largely been confined to Jewish scholars, among whom the mainstream opinion was similarly that the language of Adam was Hebrew. Indeed, several Jewish writers of antiquity recounted a story, not actually in the Bible, but based on it, with ideas that should by this point sound very familiar. The story goes that the Assyrian king Nimrod, also said, extra-biblically, to be the King who ordered the building of the Tower of Babel, had seen an astrological portent indicating the birth of Abraham, and ordered all the newborn male babies in his kingdom to be killed, but Abraham survived because his mother hid him in a cave. The 1st-century-CE Rabbi Eliezer writes that "After 13 years, he went forth from beneath the Earth, speaking the holy language."

Around the end of the 15th century, however, Christians began to take an interest, and to think of Hebrew as one of the great ancient literary languages, as worthy of study as Latin or Greek. And both Christian and Jewish printers in Italy began to publish Hebrew texts aimed at Christian readers. The obvious reason you might think Christians would have taken an interest in Hebrew is that it's the language the Old Testament was originally written in, and you can better understand the Bible if you can read it in the original language - and that is partly true, especially as the Reformation would get going over the next few decades, and Protestant reformers emphasised individual study of the Bible, rather than relying on its interpretation through the authorities of the Church, and began to produce translations of the Bible into modern languages. But the Christian interest in Hebrew that developed, mostly centred on Italy, in the 16th century (mostly in the space between the reign of James IV and when Pitscottie wrote down the rumour about James's language experiment), would also be driven by more esoteric concerns.

In about 1480, aged about 17, the Italian nobleman Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, who had already dropped out of studying Church law in Bologna, moved to Padua to study Aristotelian philosophy. He was already fluent in Latin and Greek, having studied under the humanist philosopher Marsilio Ficino, but in Padua he met the Jewish scholar Elias del Medigo, an expert in the work of the 12th-century Andalusian philosopher Ibn Rushd, or Averroes, who was known for his commentaries on Aristotle that were extremely influential throughout Medieval Europe. Del Medigo taught Pico Hebrew and Arabic, which gave him a way in to a whole new intellectual world. He became fascinated by the Medieval Jewish mystical tradition of Kabbalah.

I'm not really qualified to explain the complexities of Kabbalah very thoroughly, and there's also not really time here, so I'll keep to a very basic level. In short, Kabbalah is a system of esotericism based on the teachings of the Zohar, a book probably written by Moses de Leon in the 13th century, that he claimed was a copy of a manuscript by the 2nd-century CE sage Simeon ben Yochai, from Roman Judaea, recording what was revealed to him by God, although the consensus nowadays is that it was most likely in fact Moses de Leon's original work, albeit certainly drawing on pre-existing Jewish mystical theology. The point that's relevant here is that Kabbalah ascribes an extremely important status to the Hebrew language. Kabbalists believe that God formed the universe from the Hebrew language, with the individual letters of the Hebrew script forming in a sense building blocks of creation. And in the Hebrew text of the Torah, the words do not simply function as a means for communicating meaning, but each word, and each individual letter, has its own profound spiritual significance.

Anyway, Pico della Mirandola threw himself into the study of this mystical tradition, and used it as the basis for his fantastically ambitious scheme of unifying every single school of thought he could think of, from the whole of human history (or at least the section of it 15th-century Italians knew about), in a single set of principles. He announced a public debate, to be held in Rome in 1487, challenging anyone who was willing to attend and dispute with him. And in advance, he published what became known as his 900 Conclusions. This work consists of a series of a whole 900 disconnected statements, derived from an exceptionally broad range of intellectual traditions, introduced thus:

"THE FOLLOWING NINE HUNDRED DIALECTICAL, MORAL, PHYSICAL, MATHEMATICAL, Metaphysical, Theological, Magical, and Cabalistic opinions, including his own and those of the wise Chaldeans, Arabs, Hebrews, Greeks, Egyptians, and Latins, will be disputed publicly by Giovanni Pico of Mirandola, the Count of Concord. In reciting these opinions, he has not imitated the splendor of the Roman language, but the style of speaking of the most celebrated Parisian disputers, since this is used by almost all philosophers of our time. The doctrines to be debated are proposed separately by nations and their sect leaders, but in common in respect to the parts of philosophy - as though in a medley, everything mixed together."

One of these theses claimed that

"No science yields greater proof of the divinity of Christ than magic and the Kabbalah",

briefly summarising Pico's belief that, despite its Jewish origins, the esoteric complexities of this discipline supplied proof of a range of specifically Christian doctrines.

I should note here that, ironically for the man whose teaching enabled Pico's study of Kabbalah, Elias Del Medigo himself was very much a skeptic, and pointed out that Kabbalah was quite clearly heavily influenced by the Neoplatonic philosophy of late antiquity, and as such was more likely to be a medieval invention than an ancient divine revelation. Instead, Pico dived into the mysteries of Kabbalah with the help of Yochanan Allemano, another Italian Jewish scholar, this time with more esoteric tastes - like Pico, he had rebelled against his teacher, Judah Messer Leon, a down-to-earth scholar of Aristotle and Averroes, in the same style as Del Medigo, who was likewise suspicious of Kabbalah's Neoplatonic connections.

Pico della Mirandola wasn't the very first Christian to take an interest in Kabbalah. The 13th-century Catalan theologian Ramon Llull (notable both for his intricate system of logic intended, of course, to conclusively prove the truth of Christianity, and also as the supposed author of a range of alchemical texts which did not in fact have anything to do with him) took an interest and, like Pico, saw it as demonstrating that Christianity was the one true faith. But it was really Pico della Mirandola who pushed Christian Kabbalah into the mainstream, and it became fashionable from this point onwards, with Renaissance humanist scholars incorporating Kabbalistic ideas into their overall framework of the knowledge of the ancients that they saw themselves as attempting to revive, and reinterpreting it so that it could be used to argue for the divinity of Jesus.

The newfound Christian interest in Kabbalah fed into a movement from Christian scholars keen to study Hebrew, a language upon whose inherent sacredness Kabbalah depends. Johann Reuchlin, a scholar of Latin and Greek from Pforzheim, in the Black Forest, visited Italy in 1482, and again in 1490, meeting Pico della Mirandola, who told him about Kabbalah, and Reuchlin became similarly obsessed, seeing the Hebrew language as a means to explore these esoteric mysteries, and also to better understand the Bible, and spread this craze to Germany on his return.

Intellectuals from across Europe began to travel to Italy to learn the language, like Pico della Mirandola had, from Jewish Hebraists in Italy's vibrant Jewish intellectual scene, bolstered by refugees from the atrocities of the era in Germany and Spain. Notable among these teachers, and one whose life story illustrates the ups and downs and fundamental instability of the lives of these Jewish scholars was Elias Levita.

Originally from Neustadt-an-der-Aisch, in Bavaria, Levita, probably escaping intensifying persecution of Germany's Jewish population, emigrated to Italy at some point in the late 15th century. He ended up in Venice, and then Padua, where he taught Hebrew to Jewish students, wrote a commentary on a Hebrew grammar by the 12th-century Provencal Rabbi Moses Kimhi (although his scribe absconded with the manuscript while Padua's Jewish quarter was locked down amid a plague outbreak and published it in Rome under his own name), and also found time to write in his native Yiddish, producing the Bovo-Bukh - the "Book of Bovo", probably the best-known work of Old Yiddish literature, a reworking of the Italian chivalric romance Buovo d'Antona, itself adapted from the English romance Beavis of Hampton, with perhaps the most striking change from the original being that, in Levita's version, the explicitly Christian themes of the original are largely gone, and references to specifically Jewish concepts added, to the point that even the religion of Bovo, the titular medieval knight, is ambiguous enough that some scholars have argued that Levita actually intended him to be Jewish.

Anyway, In 1509, Padua was caught up in the chaos of the War of the League of Cambrai, which I described in the last episode. The Emperor's mercenaries captured the city from Venice, and in the process sacked the Jewish Quarter. Levita was forced back to Venice, and from there moved to Rome three years later. In Rome, he taught Hebrew to the theologian and cardinal Egidio da Viterbo, another pioneer of Christian Kabbalah, and transcribed Kabbalistic manuscripts for him. He also produced another Hebrew grammar, the Sefer ha-Bahur - the "Book of Bahur", named after a Hebrew rendering of Levita's Yiddish nickname Bokher, or student.

In 1527, Levita would be uprooted yet again, this time due to the War of the League of Cognac - not quite as confusing as the War of the League of Cambrai, but Genoa and the Papal States have still ended up listed on both sides of the infobox on its Wikipedia page. Anyway, the Pope allied with Venice to defeat the Emperor, Charles V, who was also King of Spain, and take over his territories in Italy. France, Florence, Genoa and Milan piled in on the Pope's side, forming the League of Cognac, but almost immediately began losing. Despite his successes, the Emperor made the classic mistake of not paying his army. The army had to get paid one way or another, so they mutinied and set about plundering. Fortunately for the emperor, though, they continued to attack the opposite side, and the mutinous army, including 14,000 of the notorious German mercenaries known as the Landsknechte, and led by the Duke of Bourbon, who claimed that the mutinous army had forced him into it, advanced on Rome. On the 6th of May they stormed the city, and the Duke of Bourbon was shot dead in the process, allegedly by none other than the sculptor Benvenuto Cellini.

Now in Rome, and with nobody at all to tell them what to do, the Landsknechte went even more rogue than was originally planned, stealing anything they could find and killing anyone who got in the way. Many of the Landsknechte were followers of the new Lutheran faith, and would have regarded the Pope not simply as an opponent in a geopolitical conflict, but as the actual Antichrist - and it's not really any surprise then that Churches were particular targets for the plunder, with valuable items obviously being stolen, images and relics being desecrated and priests being murdered.

The Emperor, despite apologising for the devastation inflicted by his mutinous army, had no problem taking advantage of the victory and now had the Pope thoroughly cowed into submission - a state of affairs that had far-reaching consequences when the King of England wanted his marriage to the Emperor's aunt, Catherine of Aragon, annulled, and the Pope had little choice but to refuse.

But in Rome, amid the murderous rampage of the Landsknechte, and the plague and famine that frequently accompanied marauding armies then and now, pretty much everyone who was able to got out of the city. And this included Elias Levita.

As with both previous occasions he was forced to flee from the ravages of war and persecution, Levita returned to Venice. And here he was able to work on what is probably his most interesting and controversial work.

First published in 1538, the Massoreth ha-Massoreth is a commentary on the Masorah - that is, the abundant collection of explanatory notes, pronunciation guides, and commentary on the Hebrew Bible that had been accumulating from Biblical times until the late middle ages, aimed at preserving the integrity of the text through centuries of cultural and linguistic upheavals. In giving it its reduplicative title, Levita was presumably suggesting that it is the Masorah's Masorah, as it were, to the Masorah what the Masorah is to the Bible.

The text has three parts, named the "First Tables", the "Second Tables" and the "Broken Tables", respectively named after the tablets with the Ten Commandments written on them that were originally given to Moses, the tablets that God replaced them with after Moses broke the first tablets during the Golden Calf incident, and the third part named for those original tablets after Moses had broken them. Appropriately enough, the first two sections each consist of ten subsections. However, the most controversial part of the work was in the third of its three introductions (plus a preface). It concerns the vowel markers used in the Hebrew Bible.

It's important to note here that in Hebrew, like in Arabic, or Egyptian Hieroglyphs, vowels are mostly not explicitly written. This makes it quite difficult for someone not already familiar with the language to read - you can't really sound out words, and often there are several completely different words that have the same consonants but different vowels, and you just have to infer which word it is from the context. Take as an example the letters shin-lamed-mem-he. Sh-l-m-h. The Wiktionary entry for this particular sequence gives Shlomó - the name, after the Biblical Solomon, sh'lemá - "complete", salmá - "clothes", or shil'má - "she paid".

In a situation such as religious scriptures, where it's critically important that the written word can be correctly understood and pronounced, including by people who don't necessarily actually speak the language fluently - and bear in mind that between antiquity and the late 19th century, Hebrew existed solely as a classical, written language with no native speakers whatsoever, so without being explicitly written, vowels would have to be transmitted orally, from one second-language speaker to another, and mistakes would be almost guaranteed to creep in.

This problem is solved in Hebrew using "vowel pointers", or niqqud - marks above and below the letters to indicate what vowel follows, plus a few other nuances of pronunciation. These are not usually used in modern Hebrew, and are absent from the Torah scrolls that are read from in synagogues, but are used in the Masoretic text - that is, the authoritative, annotated Bible text used in Torah study.

At the time Elias Levita was active, the conventional, orthodox view on the origin of the vowel pointers in the Hebrew Bible was that they were divinely inspired, and were handed down to Adam, or Moses, or to the scribe Ezra in the Old Testament after the end of the Babylonian Captivity. Levita, however, argued that they were in fact added by the Masoretes in the first millennium CE, reflecting pronunciations that had been transmitted orally up to that point. Among his arguments were that the Talmud, the collection of Rabbinical opinions compiled over the first millennium CE that forms the basis of Jewish Law, never mentions vowel pointers, and strongly implies that, at the time it was compiled, there was no definitive written source for the vowels in the Hebrew Bible, and they were transmitted orally.

This seems to defy Kabbalistic teachings, where the vowel-points in the Hebrew Bible are taken as having been divinely-revealed along with the letters themselves. Indeed, the Zohar, the foundational text of Kabbalah, supposedly the product of a divine revelation to Simeon ben Yochai in the 2nd Century CE, says:

"The letters are the body, and the vowel-points are the soul: they move with the motions and stand still with the resting of the vowel-points, just as an army moves after its sovereign."

And indeed, the first serious attempt at debunking Levita's ideas from a Jewish perspective, which was published by Azzariah de Rossi in 1575, decades after the Massoreth ha-Massoreth, directly appeals to the Zohar, although this argument depends on the assumption that the Zohar was indeed the work of Simeon ben Yochai in the Roman period, centuries before the Masoretes, who Levita claims added the vowel marks, while the modern consensus is that the Zohar was written in Medieval Spain by Moses de León, centuries after the age of the Masoretes. His other arguments are that the ambiguities introduced by not using vowel points make it implausible that they weren't used in the original Bible, and - what I think is his strongest argument - that the other Semitic languages (such as Arabic, Syriac, and Chaldean), which also don't write vowels, all at least sometimes use vowel points (although this ignores the possibility that the Masoretes, working under the Ummayad Caliphate, got the idea from Arabic vowel marks). De Rossi claimed that a system of Hebrew vowel-marking was given by God to Adam in the Garden of Eden, and passed down all the way through the first parts of the Old Testament until the Babylonian Captivity, when they were forgotten. They were revealed again to Ezra, when the Babylonian Captivity ended and Temple was restored.

While we're on this topic, it's also important to note that Elias Levita doesn't claim that the Biblical vowels themselves were actually invented by the Masoretes, or that they inferred what the intended vowels were likely to be from their knowledge of the Hebrew language and the context of the words, but simply that they invented a system for writing the vowels that were already perfectly known, but had been transmitted entirely orally up to that point. Neither side in this debate sees the Hebrew of the Bible as an ordinary language subject to the same instability as other language.

The era in which Elias Levita lived was an interesting one for Christianity. In 1517, the year before Levita moved to Rome to teach Egidio da Viterbo, a professor of Theology at the University of Wittenberg had written to the Archbishop of Mainz, alerting him to the fact that priests under his jurisdiction were selling indulgences, effectively charging a fee to forgive sins, and then he had invited other scholars to debate him on the topic of indulgences, posting the points to be debated on the door of All Saints' Church in Wittenberg, as was standard practice for arranging academic disputations, most likely using paste rather than nails. Anyway, things escalated from there, and Martin Luther publishing his 95 Theses is usually regarded as the start of the Reformation.

The Protestant reformers rejected the idea that the Bible needed to be interpreted through the authority of the Church, and instead emphasised the importance of personally understanding the Biblical text, including reading it in the original language, and translating it into local vernacular languages, as opposed to relying on the Vulgate, St Jerome's Latin translation from the 4th Century, that was treated by the Catholic Church as definitive. It shouldn't come as that much of a surprise that Protestants and Catholics saw great significance in a debate that seemed to concern the reliability of the text of the Hebrew Bible. Interestingly though, at first, the controversy didn't split along sectarian lines, and the most important figures on both sides of the reformation seem to have come down on Levita's side, each side using his points to argue in support of their own denomination.

Before Levita, there had been a few Catholic writers, going back to the 13th century, who had argued that the vowel pointers in the Masorah were an invention of the Masoretes, albeit often informed as much by antisemitic conspiracy theories as by a serious analysis of textual evidence. Take as an example Perez de Valencia, in the 15th century, who tells a lurid story about how, seeing the success of Christianity after the conversion of Constantine as a threat to their revenue streams, a group of Rabbis got together and decided to deliberately falsify the text of the Bible. These ideas became much more prominent in the 16th century, especially after the Massoreth ha-Massoreth was translated into Latin. The context of the reformation saw Catholics arguing that the lack of explicitly-marked vowels in the original text of the Bible proved that it was God's intention that simply reading the Bible would not be sufficient to correctly understand its entire message, and that interpretation (i.e. by the Catholic Church) was necessary, rather than just anyone reading the Bible and drawing their own conclusions from the ambiguous Hebrew text.

Most of the best-known early Protestant reformers, including Luther and Zwingli, also supported the idea that the vowel-points were added by the Masoretes (and thus shouldn't be taken particularly seriously, allowing some flexibility in how to translate the Old Testament). Luther was, of course, a raging antisemite, even by the standards of the time, and echoed the Medieval claim that the vowel-points were part of a Jewish conspiracy to falsify the word of God.

By the 17th century, though, Protestants had largely pivoted the other way, and started arguing that the biblical vowel-points were, in fact, as old as the text itself. For instance, Johannes Buxtorf, in 1620, published a Commentary on the Massorah, discussing the Massorah, and claiming that the Hebrew vowel-pointers do in fact date back all the way to Adam. His arguments primarily appeal to the fact that vowel-pointers are applied inconsistently, and that these inconsistencies are noted in the Masoretic commentaries, and that it is simply implausible that accurate pronunciation of the Hebrew Bible could be perfectly memorised purely orally.

By-and-large, the arguments made by Christians were not particularly well-informed. As Christian D. Ginsburg says, in the introduction to his translation of the Massoreth ha-Massoreth,

"Both Catholics and Protestants, however, chiefly relied upon abusing each other, and upon their common hatred of the Jews, to make good their assertions."

Towards the end of his life, Levita managed to return to Germany, and in 1545, by this point in his seventies, he would finally claim credit for the book that his scribe had stolen more than 40 years earlier, which was extremely successful. He published a revised version, this time under his own name, removing the bits his scribe, Benjamin, had added (which were apparently also plagiarised, from a different source, and wildly inaccurate), as well as a poem, Sefer Dikdukim - "The Book of Grammar", lambasting Benjamin and encouraging people to read his own version of the book instead.

Umberto Eco, in The Search for the Perfect Language, defined two approaches popular in this period to arguing for the primacy of particular languages, usually Hebrew. These are Retrospective Etymologising, and Prospective Etymologising. The first of these is similar to what Socrates attempts in Cratylus, the dialogue I discussed in the very first episode of this miniseries (a quick recap, because that was several months ago. Cratylus is a dialogue by Plato in which the characters Hermogenes and Cratylus argue about the philosophy of language. Cratylus claims that words have some kind of connection to the things they denote - that the sounds that make up a word have something to do with the meaning of a word. Hermogenes, on the other hand, argues that words are entirely arbitrary, and that the connection between words and their meanings is purely a matter of convention. Socrates mediates their dispute, and it's not completely clear what side he actually ends up taking, and even how much of what he says is intended sarcastically. Part of the dialogue is taken up with Socrates suggesting spurious etymologies for Greek words, mostly deriving them from vaguely similar-sounding descriptive phrases).

Retrospective etymologising is a bit like what Socrates does with his etymologies. The goal is to show how Hebrew words can be broken down into parts that together capture the essence of the thing they denote. An especially prolific retrospective etymologist, writing, admittedly, in the early 17th century, so strictly speaking a few decades outside of the period we're interested in, was Claude Duret. At the same time as being a linguist, he was also a judge and a biologist. If you listened to the episode before last, about the Emperor Frederick II, you will have heard about the Medieval belief that barnacle geese are spontaneously generated from rotting wood. Frederick II claimed to have debunked it in the early 13th century, but Claude Duret seems to have thoroughly believed it, to an extreme extent, describing how various insects, fish, and aquatic birds are generated from rotting wood and fallen leaves. Anyway, in terms of linguistics, for some examples of the method of retrospective etymologising, I will quote his Treasure of the History of the Languages of this Universe, in turn quoted by Umberto Eco:

"The Eagle is called 'Nescher', a word formed by the combination of 'Schor' and 'Isachar', the first meaning 'to look', and the second 'to be straight' because, above all others, the eagle is a bird of firm sight whose gaze is always directed towards the sun."

"The Lion has three names, that is 'Aryeh', 'Labi', and 'Layisch'. The first name comes from another which means 'tear' or 'lacerate'; the second is related to the word 'leb' which means 'heart', and 'laab', which means 'to live in solitude'. The third name usually means a great and furious lion, and bears an analogy with the verb 'yosh', which means 'trample'... because this animal tramples and damages its prey".

The other approach, that Eco calls Prospective Etymologising, involves coming up with fanciful Hebrew etymologies of words in other languages. This method really has its origins in the mid-16th century, again largely inspired by Christian Kabbalah, reinforcing the much older belief that Hebrew is the original language.

Conrad Gessner, from Zurich, in the middle of the 16th century, was an early Prospective Etymologist. Like Duret, he was also a naturalist, and published a five-volume encyclopedia of animals, with absolutely splendid illustrations, with alphabetically-organised entries on several hundred animals that actually exist, and even quite a few that don't, including unicorns, various sea monsters, and the 'Sea Monk', which is essentially a fish that looks like a monk (it's quite possible that some of these were added by the printers without Gessner's permission). As far as linguistics is concerned, he believed quite strongly that all languages retain corrupted versions of Hebrew words, and devoted his work Mithridates de Differentiis Linguarum - "Mithridates on Differences of Language" (named after Mithridates, an ancient King of Pontus who was apparently known for being a polyglot), to demonstrating this thesis through translations of the Lord's Prayer into an impressive range of languages.

A more impressive case of prospective etymologising, though, comes from Etienne Guichard - again, writing in the early 17th century, so technically just outside the timeframe we're looking at - but it's my podcast so I'm going to talk about him anyway and nobody can stop me. Guichard was yet another Christian Kabbalist, and believed, like Gessner, that Hebrew was the original language spoken in the Garden of Eden, and that all current languages are ultimately corrupted versions of it. Guichard's claim was based on the idea (which I would disagree with, but I guess it's a matter of opinion) that Hebrew has very simple morphology.

Most Hebrew words, as Guichard correctly pointed out, and indeed most words in all Semitic languages, are based on a stem consisting of three consonants, and you can generate a large range of meanings by placing other things in among the three consonants. For an example that has yielded quite a few terms, between Hebrew and Arabic, that will be familiar to English speakers, take the Proto-Semitic root Sh-L-M, meaning "to be complete", "to be safe" or "to be at peace" - this gives you words like Salaam, Shalom, Solomon, Salman, Selim, Salome, Salma, Salem, Islam, Muslim. From this point, Guichard applied the Kabbalistic practice of Temurah - rearranging the consonants of Hebrew words - to get combinations that sounded a bit like words in other languages.

For instance, he suggests a mechanism by which the Hebrew word batar - to divide - gave rise to the Latin dividere. Starting with batar, rearranging the consonants gives you tarab, which in turn leads to the Latin tribus (an actual Latin word, meaning 'tribe' or 'nationality' or something like that - the actual etymology here is probably more interesting, and I hadn't made this connection before researching for this episode. Tribus, meaning 'tribe', is related to tres, the number three, and originally referred to the three tribes that feature in Rome's foundation mythology as the city's first inhabitants), which in turn gives you distribuo - 'I distribute' (this particular step actually is correct). The step from here to dividere is simply stated without proof - trivial and left as an exercise for the reader.

I think Eco's criticism of Guichard's methodology sums it up pretty well:

"The thousand or so pages of Guichard are really little more than an extensive raiding expedition in which languages, dead and living, are pillaged for their treasures. More or less by chance, Guichard sometimes manages to hit upon a real etymological connection; but there is little scientific method in his madness."

And that brings us to one of the most remarkable characters I've come across (and a contemporary of Pitscottie): Guillaume Postel.

Postel was a polyglot, and one of those autodidact prodigies it's really annoying to read about. He apparently taught himself Greek, Hebrew and Arabic as a teenager, and learned Spanish and Portuguese from a Portuguese friend in Paris. And in 1536, in his mid-twenties, he was dispatched to Constantinople as part of a French embassy to the court of Suleiman the Magnificent, in order to collect Middle-Eastern manuscripts for the King of France's library. He learned Turkish while he was there, and returned to Paris in 1537 with an impressive haul of rare Arabic manuscripts as diplomatic gifts from the Sultan, most notably including Muntahā al-idrāk fī taqāsīm al-aflāk - "The Ultimate Grasp of the Divisions of Spheres", in which the 12th-century astronomer Al-Kharaqi criticised Ptolemaic astronomy and instead argued that the planets move through hollow tubes within solid celestial spheres, as well as Kabbalistic texts given to him by the Sultan's Jewish physician Moses Almuli.

On the way back he passed through Venice, where he encountered none other than his fellow language-enthusiast Elias Levita, as well as Teseo Ambrogio, a scholar of Syriac, who had learned the language from two Syrian monks who had been sent to Rome as part of a diplomatic delegation to the Pope and then had stayed in Italy.

In Venice, Postel also published his Introduction to Twelve Languages with Alphabets of Different Characters. In it, he compares the Aramaic, Syriac, Samaritan, Arabic, Ge'ez (the Ethiopian liturgical language which he calls 'Indian', and which was largely known in Europe through a small community of Ethiopian monks living in Rome), Greek, Coptic (which he calls 'Georgian'), South Slavonic, Glagolitic (an old writing system for Slavic Languages) Armenian and Latin scripts, and argues that all of them descend from the Hebrew script (not actually that far off, current consensus is that these scripts all share a common ancestor in a phonetic alphabet based on Egyptian Hieroglyphs adapted to write Semitic languages). And of course he also argued that Hebrew was the original language, which Adam spoke when God granted him the ability to call things by their appropriate names, and Arabic, Chaldean (or Biblical Aramaic, used to write a few bits of the Old Testament), Greek, and Ge'ez, all descend from it (half a point for Arabic, Chaldean and Ge'ez, which are indeed Semitic languages, sharing a relatively recent common ancestor with Hebrew, while Greek is an Indo-European language, whose common ancestor with Hebrew would have been spoken long before the horizon that can be reached through comparative linguistics). He further argues for the idea of Hebrew as the original language in On Origins, or On the Antiquity of the Hebrew Language and People, where he compares Hebrew words to similar-sounding words in Arabic, Ge'ez (or 'Indian', as he calls it), Greek and French to make this point. The similar ties to Arabic and Ge'ez often are genuinely indicative of the relationships between these Semitic languages, while the similarities to Greek and French all seem to be either loan words or cherry-picked coincidences.

And from here his beliefs became increasingly eccentric. In 1538 he was appointed as a Professor of Arabic at the newly-founded Royal College in Paris, and was primarily concerned with teaching Arabic to Christians who could use it to convert Muslims t Christianity. He began having visions, and left his job four years later, going on to publish De Orbis Terrae Concordia - "On the Concord of the Terrestrial Globe". In this, his fascination with eastern cultures and languages, his obsession with Kabbalah, and his ambition of converting the Islamic world to Christianity fused together into an idiosyncratic idea of a global Commonwealth, where political and religious differences collapsed. This would use Hebrew, the language given to Adam in the Garden of Eden, as its Lingua Franca. This would be particularly conducive to world peace and an end to political and even religious conflict, due to the perfect correspondence between words and the things they denote. This commonwealth, would, of ourse, be ruled by the King of France, who was a direct descendant of Noah via his grandson Gomer, and who would appoint a new Angelic Pope - a little bit of a cross-over with a previous episode, if you have a very good memory, you might recall the name of a certain Gioacchino da Fiore, a 12th-century Italian mystic who prophesied that the baby who would grow up to be Emperor Frederick II was "perverse and evil", and that "he shall shake the Earth and shall crush the saints of the Most High". The idea of the Angelic Pope comes from one of his prophecies, relating to the supposedly imminent final age.

In 1544, Postel went to Rome, and joined the Jesuit order of friars, known for their international missionary work, and their efforts to convert the entire world to Catholicism, so in a sense very appropriate for Postel's ambitions. But he was thrown out a year later, as a result of his eccentric beliefs, especially the bit about French world domination (there's a possibility he was also claiming to be the Angelic Pope, which would obviously conflict with the Jesuit order's vow of obedience to the actual Pope).

In 1547, he ended up as chaplain to the Ospedaletto, the Hospital of Sts John and Paul in Venice, and this was where he met a nun, by the name of Mother Zuana, and became obsessed.

Postel was, as I already mentioned, an enthusiastic devotee of Christian Kabbalah, and he attempted to insert Mother Zuana specifically into this mystical system. The role he assigned to her escalated, with him identifying her with the Shekinah - the female embodiment of God in Kabbalah - with the Angelic Pope, and even seeing her as a second Messiah, a female equivalent of Jesus Christ. As man was redeemed by Christ from the sin of Adam, so woman would be redeemed from the sin of Eve by this 50-year-old Italian nun.

Pretty soon, though, amid scurrilous rumours about their relationship, he had to leave Venice, choosing to head east to where else but the Ottoman Empire. In 1549, though, Mother Zuana died, and Postel went back to Paris, resuming his earlier teaching career, before pretty quickly getting back into the Mother Zuana business, and announcing the impending Third Age, as prophesied by Gioacchino da Fiore, ruled by the spirit of his favourite nun.

This is pretty clearly not compatible with the teachings of the Catholic Church, and Postel was sacked from his teaching job in Paris, returned to Venice, and was dragged before the inquisition, accused of heresy. The inquisition, in a relatively reasonable move from an organisation not generally known for their reasonableness, concluded that he was not in fact a serious heretic but was simply insane. He was imprisoned for several years, before being transferred to a French monastery, where he spent the rest of his life. He would end up walking back his beliefs about Mother Zuana, but absolutely stuck to his guns on the ideal of universal peace, a universal religion, and the role of the sacred Hebrew language in accomplishing that goal.

At the end of the day, what we've seen from all these people is that during the Renaissance, the interest in serious study of Hebrew didn't get rid of the Medieval belief in Hebrew as the original language - if anything it reinforced it, and added a more scholarly veneer to it. And at the same time, while this belief is itself profoundly archaic, the methods that start to be used to support it, comparing individual words between different languages, identifying patterns and trying to determine from that exactly how different languages are related - and using a broad geographical scope as well - Postel incorporating languages from France to the Near East to Ethiopia into his analyses - are starting to look like a rudimentary form of comparative linguistics as we might recognise it today. What Postel does, even if his methods are far from perfect, and he's clearly decided what conclusion he wants and is cherry-picking examples to support it, is far more modern-looking than the weird etymologies Socrates supplies in Cratylus.

While most scholars of the 16th century seem to have believed that Hebrew was the Original Language, there were a few who didn't. And before we finish this episode, it would be a shame to pass on an opportunity to mention Jan Gerartsen van Gorp, more often known by his Latin name Johannes Goropius Becanus, a native of Hilvarenbeek in the Southern Netherlands, born 6 years after James IV died, who believed that the closest language to the original language of humankind was not Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Arabic, or even Egyptian or Phrygian, but none other than Dutch - specifically the Brabantic dialect spoken in Antwerp.

His reasoning was that the primordial language could be expected to be very simple, and to consist primarily of very short words. Antwerp Brabantic had a lot of very short words, more than Latin or Greek, and as such must be the oldest language. Etymologies he gave in support of his claim included deriving the name Adam from the Brabantic Hath-Dam, meaning "barrier against hatred", and Noah from Noot-Acht, meaning "Pay attention to need".

He claimed that it was not in fact the ancestors of the Hebrews, but the ancestors of the Dutch, via the Cimmerians of antiquity, who had refused to work on the Tower of Babel and had been allowed to retain the language of Adam. And in fact he did acknowledge the possibility of language change, even in the perfect original language of the Cimmerians. Dutch had retained the closest affinity to the Language of Adam, but other languages, such as English and Danish, as well as Latin, Greek and Hebrew also descended from the Adamic language via Cimmerian, and all had deteriorated over the centuries from the original perfection still preserved in Brabantic Dutch.

Goropius's ideas would be spoofed in Ben Jonson's 1610 comedy The Alchemist, in which Sir Epicure Mammon, an alchemy enthusiast, shows his skeptical companion Surly what he claims is "A treatise penned by Adam, of the Philosopher's Stone... And in High Dutch... Which proves it was the primitive tongue". And at about the same time, William Camden would dismiss both the traditional belief that the Ancient Britons were descendants of Aeneas, the legendary refugee from the Trojan war who the Romans claimed as a founding father of their city, via his similarly legendary grandson, Brutus, who conquered the island from the giants that previously inhabited it, and Goropius's claim that the Britons were descended from the Cimmerians via the Danes (and that the name Britannia comes from a word that Camden gives as Bridania, meaning "Free Dania" - presumably corresponding to the modern Dutch Vrij Dania), and would instead claim that the Britons were indeed descendants of the Cimmerians, but via migrants from Gaul, and that Welsh is in fact the language that retains the closest affinity to the Language of Adam. And later still, the mathematician, philosopher, linguist and co-inventor of calculus, Gottfried von Leibniz, would coin the term “Goropizing” to refer to the use of spurious etymologies to support pseudohistorical claims.

Goropius makes reference to Cratylus, the dialogue by Plato that I discussed in the first episode, where the characters discuss whether or not words have an intrinsic relationship to the concepts they refer to. And like the dialogue's title character, Goropius argues that the individual letters making up words in Cimmerian represent components of its meaning, such as the letter a representing motion, and a paper by R.A. Naborn points out that he uses the same etymological methods that Socrates uses in Cratylus as well. These methods are:

• Adding letters (for example, Dutch or ("origin") to Latin ordo ("order"))
• Removing letters (for example, Dutch just ("right") to Latin ius ("right"))
• Replacing letters (for example, Dutch weer ("weather") to Ancient Greek ber ("weather")) (I will note here that I can't find any reference to this Greek word outside Goropius)
• Reversing a word (for example, Dutch cal ("chat") to Latin loquor ("talk"))

To be fair, Goropius correctly identifies some pairs of actual cognates (for example just and ius) that modern linguists would agree do indeed share common roots in Proto-Indo-European. But the problem with these methods is that they basically allow you to demonstrate that pretty much any language is related to any other language, especially if you also cherry-pick examples of pairs of words that fit these patterns. That's why modern comparative linguistics depends on identifying consistent patterns of particular sound correspondences between languages in order to show that they're related (the most famous example is probably Grimm's Law, a set of sound correspondences between Proto-Indo-European and the Germanic languages, such as p in Proto-Indo-European corresponding to f in Germanic languages - English foot is cognate with French pied or Greek podi, English five is cognate with Welsh pump and Hindi pā̃c. But this wasn't suggested until the early 19th Century by the Danish linguist Rasmus Rask, and then independently by Jacob Grimm, best known as the older of the Brothers Grimm). If meanings only approximately have to match, sounds only approximately have to match, and you're allowed to apply any of the four methods Naborn describes whenever you need to, then I'd imagine you can come up with examples that appear to demonstrate the relationship of pretty much any language to any other.

The idea that there is a particular language that is the best seemed remarkably difficult to kill. Modern linguistics generally approaches languages from the perspective that they're all equal - no language is objectively better or worse or more or less important than any other. But most of these people in the 16th century and before seem to have been obsessed with the idea of there being a language that is the best.

Overall, what we're really seeing is that, in the period between James IV's reign and Robert Lindsay of Pitscottie writing his chronicle, when the rumour of James's investigation into language acquisition would have developed, the increasing interest in the study of ancient languages initially did very little to dispel the idea that Hebrew was the Language of Adam, and the perfect language of Cratylus, where words correctly correspond to the things they denote (Eco points out how scholars in this period mostly treated these two things as pretty much interchangeable, although one doesn't actually necessarily follow from the other). If anything, this idea was reinforced, and given a more sophisticated intellectual backing. In the Middle Ages, at least to the average Christian, Hebrew was largely something mysterious, powerful, magical, at once sacred and demonic. But now Christian scholars were beginning to actually study the language, and Jewish scholars studying it with increasing intellectual rigour, this belief in the language's inherent sanctity was propped up with methods of analysis that were pseudo-scientific.

And while this mostly took place in Italy (and a bit in France, Germany and the Low Countries), a long way from Scotland, an educated Scot would hardly have been unaware of these intellectual upheavals. James IV's court was connected enough to the intellectual world of Renaissance Italy to employ John Damian, an Italian alchemist and aviation pioneer, and for James to get dragged, with disastrous consequences, into a stupid war between Italian city states. So I don't think it's at all unlikely that these developments contributed to an intellectual environment where it was believable that children isolated on an island, raised by a mute wetnurse, with no exposure to language, would spontaneously start speaking Hebrew, the perfect language given to Adam in the Garden of Eden, and out of whose letters God fashioned the Universe.

Next time, I'll start on the final one of the four language experiments this series is covering, this time said to have been performed a century later, in the Mughal Empire, by the remarkable Emperor Akbar the Great.

Thank you for listening. I'm sorry it's been a long wait again, especially considering I'd written half this episode already. I lost a couple of weeks recovering from surgery and then just as I'd pretty much finished I ended up running in to Christmas which took out a few more days, and then just as I was ready to record it I got a cold which meant my voice sounded really dodgy. Anyway, I think this was worth the wait, I hope you agree. Remember to follow and share the podcast on Facebook, Instagram, Bluesky and the website formerly known as Twitter. Go to the website, scienceapeculiarhistory.co.uk, to find transcripts, images and sources for previous series - I'm still in the process of adding them, but I'll eventually catch up. You can listen to the podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or most places you can get podcasts, and if you've got any questions, comments, corrections, or suggestions for topics I could cover, you can contact any of the social media channels, email admin@scienceapeculiarhistory.co.uk, or use the contact form on the website.

Thank you again, come back next time to hear about Akbar the Great and his linguistic investigations.