ABSTRACT
The problem of monogenesis in language is definitely linked with the problem of monogenesis of man himself. Now the monogenesis of the human race is one problem on which anthropologists are noticeably and understandably discreet. Their reluctance to make categorical pronouncements is no longer based on fears of running into religious reprisals at the hands of those who interpret the Bible literally, but on lack of satisfactory evidence, in either direction. Polygenesis of language, tentatively accepted in the course of the nineteenth century for lack of evidence to the contrary, found its most outspoken opponent in the person of A. Trombetti, who in his Unità d’origine del linguaggio, and later, in his Elementi di glottologia, upheld the thesis of the original unity of all languages.
