The Celtic was the Language of Eden
Let us seriously examine this proposition. Of the Gaelic speech the Very Rev. Canon Bourke writes:
"In its plastic power and phonetic fecundity Irish-Gaelic possesses like its primitive Aryan parent tongue, not only the virtual but the formal germinal developments of dialectic variety."
And Canon Bourke also says:
"The science of Comparative Philology has, without direct reference to revelation, enabled men of literary research to discover the most convincing proofs, to show that before the dispersion of the human family there existed a common language, admirable in its raciness, in its vigour, its harmony, and the perfection of its forms."[1]
That common primeval language of Man, which some call by the name "Aryan," I prefer to call the Scythian; for the following reasons: Phoeniusa Farsaidh (or Fenius Farsa: see No. 14, on the "Lineal Descent of the Royal Family," Part I., c. iv.), son of Baoth, son of Magog, son of Japhet, was, according to the Four Masters, the inventor of Letters: he was also the grandfather of Gaodhal, a quo the Gaels. This Phoeniusa Farsaidh was king of Scythia, and was the ancestor of the Phoenicians: after him the Scythian language was called the "Phoenician." It is worthy of remark that Cadmus [2] the Phoenician, who is mentioned by O'Flaherty in his Ogygia, as brother of Phoeniusa Farsaidh, was, according to the ancient Irish annalists, contemporary with Joshua, and it is a curious coincidence that the Alphabet [3] of the Gaels consisted of sixteen letters—the very number of letters as in the Phoenician Alphabet, and the very number brought by Cadmus to Greece, from Egypt, where the Gaels were first located, and whence they made their first migration, namely—that to the Island of Creta (now called Candia), in the Mediterranean Sea.
According to the Four Masters, the Scythian language was the Celtic; which, after Gaodhal [gael] who "refined and adorned it," was called Gaodhilg or Gaelic.
Notes
[1] Forms: See Bourke's Aryan Origin of the Gaelic Race and Language. In the same strain writes Adolphe Pictet, of Geneva, in his Les Origines Indo-Europeennes, ou les Aryas Primetife (Paris, 1859).
[2] Cadmus: This name may be derived from the Irish Cadhmus [caw-mus], which means "pride." Some persons, however, advance the opinion that there was no such person as Cadmus ; while others maintain that there was such a man, for that he founded a colony in Boetia, and that the town of Cadmea, in that colony, was called after him!
[3] Alphabet: This circumstance regarding the Gaelic alphabet is the more remarkable, as its whole natural and primitive stock of letters is but sixteen in number ; the same as that of the first Roman or Latin alphabet which, according to Tacitus (Anal, ii) and Pliny (Lib. 7, c. 56), Evander, the Arcadian, brought from Greece to the Aborigines of Italy, and which was the original Phoenician set of letters communicated by Cadmus to the Greeks. And yet our sixteen letters of the primitive Irish alphabet were sufficient for all the essential purposes of language ; each preserving its own sound or power, without usurping that of any other letter.—See O'Brien's Irish Dictionary.