Word Game

NAMING-DAY IN EDEN (159 pp.)--Noah Jonathan Jacobs--Macmillan ($3.95).

It is Author Jacobs' engaging notion that language began in the Garden of Eden, when God allowed Adam to name the animals. With that practice session out of the way, Adam was ready to confront Eve. "Madam, I'm Adam," he said, gracefully launching a palindrome.* His ribmate was equal to the occasion. "Eve!" she replied, topping his palindrome with a shorter one of her own.

Is it surprising to be told that Adam and Eve spoke English? Not necessarily. As Author Jacobs points out, German, Hungarian, Swedish, Celtic, Danish and Basque scholars have all proved to their satisfaction that their respective language was the one spoken in the Garden of Eden. A 17th century Englishman demonstrated that the language must have been Chinese, since a newborn baby's first yell is the Chinese word ya.

Author Jacobs brings to this study of "the creation and recreation of language" a proficiency in more than a dozen tongues. Brooklyn-born, onetime chief interpreter for the military government in Berlin, and now librarian of the Linguistics Department at the University of Jerusalem, he ranges through history, religion, love, and 37 different languages in covering everything from oxymoron (word paradoxes) to lallation (the pronunciation of l for r that is common among Chinese who speak foreign languages). A sampling of some of Author Jacobs' observations:

P: Man describes the world in terms of his own body: mouth of a river, brow of a hill, bosom of the sea. But in naming the interior of his body, man reverses the process and borrows from the outside world, e.g., eardrums, windpipes, bowels (Lat., botellus, small sausage), clavicle (Lat., clavicula, a small key), tonsils (Lat., tonsillae, shaped like stakes).

P: Some writers become both fascinated and horror-struck by words and letters. The Spanish dramatist Lope de Vega wrote five successive novels, omitting the letter a from the first, e from the second, i from the third, o from the fourth, u from the fifth. Franz Kafka was hopelessly drawn to the letter k. Kierkegaard, the father of existentialism, would drop such remarks as, "I am as reflexive as a pronoun," or, "I feel like a letter printed backward in the line." The French poet Louis Aragon spoke for many bedeviled writers in his poem entitled "Suicide":

A b c d e f

g h i j k l

m n o p q r

s t u v w

x y z

P: Peculiarities of national speech make it nearly impossible for a Greek to pronounce a b, an Arab a p, a Russian an h, a Frenchman a th. In the Sicilian Vespers of 1282, when Sicilians rebelled against their Angevin overlords, those suspected of being Frenchmen were forced, in an irresistible repeat of the Biblical shibboleth, to repeat the Italian phrase ceci e ciceri, and slaughtered when they could not manage the Italian ch sound.

Thousands of volumes have been written on the subject of language, but as Author Jacobs points out, they "often appear on poor paper with narrow margins, and, what is worse, in German." This book, fortunately, is wide margined, well written and in witty English.

* An even more famous palindrome, jokingly attributed to Napoleon: "Able was I ere I saw Elba."

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