| abstract | - The idea of a universal language is at least as old as the Biblical story of Babel and its fall — the mythical point of which is that there was once a time of a universal Adamic language (and then something happened, analogous to the Fall of Man). In the Christian tradition there are various attitudes to regaining the supposed golden age, before Babel; these include optimism, pessimism, and recourse to parody and warnings on hubris, depending on the wished interpretation of the myth. In the 18th century, some rationalist natural philosophers sought to recover the Edenic language. There were two general approaches. In one, it was assumed that education inevitably took people away from the innate state of goodness they possessed, and therefore there was an attempt to see what language a human child brought up in utter silence would speak. This was assumed to be the Edenic tongue, or at least the lapsarian tongue. However, the more common and vigorously attempted project was to either discover the most ancient language (assuming that it would be nearest to Edenic) or to compare all languages and discover their common structures and thus to understand what language God had built into humans. There were, therefore, multiple attempts to relate esoteric languages to Hebrew (e.g. Basque, Erse, and Irish), as well as the beginnings of comparative linguistics. In other traditions, there is less interest in or a general deflection of the question. For example in Islam the Arabic language is the language of the Qur'an, and so universal for Muslims. The written classical Chinese language was and is still read widely but pronounced somewhat differently by readers in different areas of China, in Korea and Japan for centuries; it was a de facto universal literary language for a broad-based culture. In something of the same way Sanskrit in India was a literary language for many for whom it was not a mother tongue. Comparably, the Latin language (qua Medieval Latin) was in effect a universal language of literati in the Middle Ages, and the language of the Vulgate Bible, in the area of Catholicism which covered most of Western Europe and parts of Northern and Central Europe also.
- Universal Language is a form of "interstellar" language used by Alliance of Four Great Races. The language was based on various elements that exist throughout the universe. (SG1: "The Torment of Tantalus")
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