Hezy Laing, "Examining Edenics, the Theory That English (and Every Other Language) Came From Hebrew", The Tablet 10/31/2013:
What if one day, instead of speaking hundreds of different languages, all of humanity suddenly began speaking the exact same language? More incredibly—what if we already do? A new movement called “Edenics” makes the claim that modern day English is simply a derivative of biblical Hebrew. In fact, the proponents of this theory say that all human languages are simply offshoots of Hebrew and claim to have thousands of examples to back them up.
The "What is Edenics?" page at edenics.org traces the idea back to Genesis, and the modern movement back to 1894, but identifies the founding document of the movement as a work published by Isaac Mozeson in 1989:
The Tower of Babel scenario of the Biblical account in Genesis 11 posits that all people spoke the same language before the Lord confused human tongues. Up until the nineteenth century it was common knowledge that the pre-Babel tongue was the language of the Bible, Ancient Hebrew and the language of Adam and Eve. Even in colonial America, Hebrew was so revered that the first dissertation in the New World, at Harvard College, was on Hebrew as The Mother Tongue. The Continental Congress nearly made Hebrew the language of the new republic, as much to break away from England as to reaffirm America’s status as the new Promised Land.
Post-Darwinian thinking dealt harshly with the lexicography of Noah Webster, whose dictionary offered “Shemitic” (Semitic) origins for many English and European terms from Germanic, Greek or Latin initial sources. It was thought that Asians, Africans and Semites evolved from separate monkeys than did the Aryans, and so these foreign tongues could have no extensive relationship to that of the different (thus superior) Indo-Europeans who dominated from Ireland in the West to India in the East.
Silent challenges to the racist and anti-biblical status quo were made by Englishman Arthur Hall in 1894 and American Simon Perlman in 1947. Their privately issued books linking English back to ancient Hebrew were too small and too flawed to make a dent in the academic linguistic community. After a decade of research came Mozeson’s The Word: The Dictionary That Reveals the Hebrew Source of English (first published by Shapolsky, NY in 1989) offering 22,000 English words linked back to Hebrew.
I seem to have stumbled into the role of Designated Persecutor, by answering an email from the journalist Hezy Laing back in July. He asked me to comment on the standing in the field of Mozeson's claims, and also to evaluate the specific etymologies Eye: Ayin; Fruit: Feyrot and Wine: Yayin. Laing also takes some quotes from an old LL post, "The origin of speeches: Wrathful dispersion for real?", 12/31/2007.
As one indication of Laing's journalistic practices, consider his attribution to me of the judgement that Mozeson's work is "a joke":
For an obscure scholar with an abstruse theory, the ferociousness of the attacks against Mozeson seems disproportionate. His work has been called in academic and popular circles “a joke,” “pseudo-science,” “farcical regression,” “a disgrace,” “idiocy,” “blaringly ignorant,” “ludicrous,” and even “dangerous.”
What I actually wrote: "This book is apparently not a joke."
