The primitive language. – We have seen the various comparisons that have been made between the Celtic and Greek languages, between Greek and Flemish, and between Sanskrit and Celtic. It is not surprising, therefore, that the idea has been conceived of a primitive language, from which all the others are derived.

The first to try to actually reconstruct this language was Bullet, a Professor of Theology at the University of Besançon, who published, in 1754, an enormous Mémoire sur la langue celtique (‘Memoir on the Celtic Language’) and a Dictionnaire celtique (‘Celtic Dictionary’) (today regarded as being of little value).

Bullet decided to search for traces of this primitive language in modern languages, using the roots of words. This method would be adopted by others – it can lead to an understanding of the laws of the Word (‘the Logos’), so important to the Cabbalists.

Let us recall in this connection the following phrase of Joseph de Maistre in his Soirées de Saint-Petersbourg (‘Evenings in Saint Petersburg’): ‘It really is a pleasure to be able to assist in the search for this hidden principle that actually forms languages’.

In 1765 President des Brosses, a friend of Voltaire, published his Traité de la formation mecanique des langues et des principes physiques de l’etymologie… (‘Treatise on the mechanical formation of languages and the physical principles of etymology…’).

Then it was the turn of Court de Gébelin, with his monumental Monde primitif (‘The primitive world’), 9 volumes in quarto (1773), in which he tried to reconstruct the language of primitive civilisation. This work enjoyed considerable fame. Court de Gébelin, says Monsieur Le Flamanc in his study Les Utopies prérévolutionnaires (‘Pre-Revolutionary Utopias’) was the glory of the Lodge of the Nine Sisters, a lodge that one could fairly rank among the great learned societies of Paris.

‘Gébelin was an ascetic and his death was lamented as if it had been a public tragedy’. Abbé de Beaulieu called him: ‘The greatest genius that the world has ever produced’.

Gébelin insisted on the importance of the Celtic language. He published a Grammaire primitive (‘Primitive grammar’) and based his work, as linguists such as Longnon and Meillet would do later, on the names of places, rivers and mountains, which preserve designations that originated in the mists of time.