Headnote

Composed after 1727; posthumously published; copy text 1765a (see Textual Account).

This compilation of learned puns and wordplay, supported by preposterously invented anecdotes, evidently dates from after the death of Sir Isaac Newton in 1727. Davis suggests that it may have been intended as an Intelligencer. Swift here plays on the linguistic tradition of looking in existing languages for features supposedly predating the confusion of tongues at the tower of Babel, when ‘the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech’. Swift names writers who had put such arguments for the French and English languages: in 1717 a similar case had been made for the Irish language in Hugh MacCurtin's A Brief Discourse in Vindication of the Antiquity of Ireland. In an indignant rebuttal of claims that Irish was ‘a mixture of other Languages’, MacCurtin explains the descent of the ‘primitive languages’ after Babel, and asserts that ‘whosoever will be pleas’d to read the most Authentic Irish histories, he shall find sufficient reasons to believe that the Scythian language (and consequently the Irish which is no other but the same) is one of the Antientest in the World’. Such debates typically involved the listing, as in Swift's ‘Discourse’, of examples held to demonstrate the processes of derivation at issue.5 Swift also invokes Richard Bentley, in fact a scholar of radically different outlook. For the relation between the ‘Discourse’ and Swift's publicly declared views on language, cf. Tatler no. 230 and Proposal for Correcting.

A DISCOURSE TO PROVE THE ANTIQUITY OF THE ENGLISH TONGUE.

During the reign of parties, for about forty years past, it is a melancholy consideration to observe how Philology hath been neglected, which was before the darling employment of the greatest authors, from the restoration of learning in Europe. Neither do I remember it to have been cultivated, since the Revolution, by any one person with great success, except our illustrious modern star, Doctor Richard Bentley, with whom the republic of learning must expire; as mathematics did with Sir Isaac Newton.