Hilaire de Barenton

Hilaire de Barenton (28 February 1864 in Barenton – 24 February 1946 in Paris), with real name Étienne Boulé, was a friar and historian of the languages of the Middle East. His name is often misspelled as de Baranton.

Ordained catholic priest in 1887, he joined the Capuchins under the name of Father Hilaire on 2 August 1889. He lectured in Turkey. Back in France, he taught science, philosophy and dogmatic theology.

Soon he acquired a reputation as a linguist, and he participated, in 1936, in the Third International Congress of Linguistics.

• La langue étrusque, dialecte de l'ancien égyptien, Paris 1920
• L'origine des grammaires, leur source dans le sumérien et l'égyptien, Paris 1925
• L'origine des langues, des religions et des peuples

The theories of Father Hilaire enjoyed a certain celebrity in their time, but have since been criticized and, albeit intriguing to the ear, are no longer considered worthy of deeper scholarly scrutiny in most of contemporary linguistic research centers and communities. They were popular among Turkish nationalists under Atatürk in the 1930s: the Sun Language Theory (Güneş Dil Teorisi), based on L'origine des langues, des religions et des peuples claimed that all languages were derived from a common Central Asian root, a paleontological "proto-language" that can only be established hypothetically, as construct, of which, not only the Turkic languages spoken in Central Asia and Turkey today, but also the Language of the Maya (in Mezzo-America) and Sumerian (as seen on tablets excavated in the Mesopotamia of the Middle East) appear to relate to.