although he may sometimes ask what certain names denote and be told, just as a language someone does not know may be translated for him, acquainting him with the meanings of its words. Yet if he spends some time among its speakers, he learns this without explicit instruction from any of them.
People may indeed give names to new things unknown to those before them. For example, someone may have a child and give him either an existing name or a newly coined one. The person giving the name may act alone, without agreeing with anyone else, or people may coincide in their naming. Likewise, someone may devise a tool for a craft, write a book, build a city, or do something similar, and give it a name, since it does not belong to an already familiar category with a name in the common language.
Allah has said:
“The Most Merciful taught the Quran, created man, and taught him speech.”
And:
“They will say, ‘Allah, who causes all things to speak, has caused us to speak.’”
And He said:
“Who created and fashioned, and who determined and guided.”
Thus He, glorified be He, inspires human beings to speak just as He inspires other creatures. If He, glorified be He, taught Adam all the names and presented the things named to the angels, as He has told us in His Book, we nevertheless know that He did not teach Adam every language that all people would speak until the Day of Resurrection, with those languages then being passed down to his children so that they spoke only those languages. Such a claim is plainly false. Only Adam’s children could have transmitted anything from him, peace be upon him, and in the year of the Flood Allah drowned all his descendants except those aboard the Ark. The lineages of those aboard the Ark subsequently died out, except for the descendants of Noah. They did not speak all the languages spoken by the nations that came after them. Indeed, a “single language,” such as Persian, Arabic, Greek, or Turkish, contains differences and varieties that none but Allah can enumerate; and the Arabs themselves