Around 1303, Dante wrote De vulgari eloquentia, a Latin treatise defending spoken languages as worthy of serious literature. It groups the Romance languages by their word for “yes”: oc in southern France, oïl in the north, sì in Italy. Scholars often cite this madterpiece as an early landmark of comparative linguistics.
Fair enough, but who was comparing languages first?
Arguably, people with something to sell.
A merchant in a foreign port had to match words for weights, prices, grades of goods, debts and oaths. Each match was a comparison between two linguistic systems, made with skin in the game.
The evidence is thin, however, because traders wrote invoices, and invoices rarely discuss grammar. Annoyingly, but revealingly, the oldest surviving writing is also a form of accounting.
At Kanesh, in Anatolia, Assyrian merchants left thousands of clay tablets from around 1900 BC recording tin and textile deals with local partners. Sumerian even had a word for interpreter, eme-bal, literally a “language-turner”.
Traders also generated contact languages. A lingua franca is a shared language that speakers of different native tongues use with one another to get business done. Its job description is short: be nobody’s first language and everybody’s second. But trading in faraway lands require a language-acquiring capability that is often underrated in history.
That points to another, potentially bigger, question of whose knowledge gets recorded. Enslaved people, interpreters and traders all practised second-language acquisition (learning a language after one’s native) under pressure, and rarely left notes. Herodotus reports that traders among the Scythians used seven interpreters for seven languages and that Egypt’s interpreters descended from boys given to Greek settlers to learn Greek. Livius Andronicus, an enslaved Greek from Tarentum, gave Rome its first Latin translation of the Odyssey.
The history of linguistics tends to credit whoever held the pen. The pen-holders seldom paid the exchange rate.