No "R" in Eden, 1669

"...the English architect (and pupil of Indigo Jones) John Webb declared [in 1669, in An Historical Essay Endeavoring a Probability that the Language of the Empire of China is the Primitive Language] that Chinese was the original language of mankind that had been spoken by Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. The Chinese characters, he noted, looked similar to those of the Hebrew alphabet: the Chinese wrote their words from the top down, as was common in ancient hieroglyphs  and finally, the Chinese couldn't pronounce the letter "R". Pronunciation of this particular letter, Webb explained, had to be drummed into European children, therefore the natural primitive  state was not to be able to pronounce it."

-- Measuring Eternity: The Search for the Beginning of Time, Martin Gorst, 2001, p. 52.