On the Origins of Speeches

Tower of Babel Русский: Вавилонская башня


On the Origins of Language Species






When you speak of linguistic evolution do you mean:
or even























About David J. James


Posted on 14/04/2012, in Blog only, Creation v Evolution, Gold List Methodology, Languages and Linguistics, Religion and Philosophy, Reposted from former and tagged , , , , , , , . Bookmark the permalink. 12 Comments.

  1. This judgmental event of the confusion of tongues makes me wonder how individual persons could maintain pair bonds and keep their families together. If so that right after forgetting the adamic language and gaining unique replacements for every single person, i don’t see how a family could understand one another and stay whole unless the respective languages they spoke were similar enough to permit comprehension. Or else, if the languages/dialects were provided at random, how could a husband speaking Turkish, for example, attempt to communicate with his Welsh-speaking wife? Also a man in love with a girlfriend speaking gibberish may be forced to find a different woman to marry who speaks a language within his language family.
    I think that this theory of every person receiving his/her own language apart from an ordered dispensation to unite families seems a little implausible, and perhaps detrimental to society ever reforming after Babel.


    • There were not any language families then. This came about only much later. Hundreds and hundreds of years later.

      It says in the Bible that they could not understand one another. Not one family another. So if we are going to place faith in a Biblical account (which so-called rationalists baulk at anyway) then it seems at least consistent to believe what it tells us in each detail given rather than make up our own version of it.

      Only if you cannot understand anyone at all do you need to grab the people you love closest and flee the nucleus. If families already understood each other the need to scatter would be obviated. You go with your wife to a remote location so that you can set about trying to learn how to communicate with her again.

      God knew that the love of people to each other would be stronger than the effort needed to learn or teach a language. Were this not so, no baby would learn to speak. Society was always going to reform by the same token, but this kick-started the flowering of many societies and cultures and was a wonderful act of creation by a loving God, who even in His chastisements presents opportunity and blessing.


    • It’s an excellent question.

      Here’s my answer: if you find your nearest family members do not understand you and vice versa but there are people outside who do, then sure, the marriages will be attained because the couple don’t understand each other and each can find others who do understand them.

      If you are in a situation so dramatic that you suddenly understand nobody, not your nearest and dearest and nobody outside either, then the panic really starts to set in, only tempered by an awareness that everyone is in the same boat.

      Now remember that humanity was not that populous at the time. Probably we are within a dozen generations or even half a dozen from Noah even allowing for the possibility that Genesis didn’t intend the generations to be complete and taken chronologically literally (which begs the question why the life times of these early fathers of humanity are even recorded for us). And so in the Biblical context we have people numbering probably not more than ten thousand or so, at this point. They had all no doubt heard of Noah who lived a long time after the Flood and might even have still been around at this point. So they knew that they had been supposed to fill the earth. They simply had started to regard that with skepticism and done their own thing instead, but on seeing such a supernatural disaster upon them, and each marked out as co-responsible by the fact that his or her language was no longer shared by another living soul and the only one left to talk to was God, would this not refocus them on what they had heard about God and disregarded, namely the command to go forth, multiply and replenish the earth?

      Well you can’t replenish the earth without grabbing your wife and family and heading off in a unique direction. So that’ll be what they did.

      The sight of other families heading off will have shown the slower of mind what to do, until only a remnant remained in the city.

      The city which may have gone on to be Babylon, or it may be somewhere else and Babylon named just in memory of that older other place. Either way Babylon as a centre of sin is a Leitmotif of scripture from Genesis right through to Revelation.

      Remember though that we are not really dealing with Turkish and Welsh. Both these languages have come a long long way from their respective ancestor languages coming out of Babel. God tells us he confused their language. I take this to mean that the initial Adamic language was perfect and rich, designed for people who wouldn’t be dying after 70 years but living eternally. Mortal, sinful man had probably already degraded this, and what God did was to scramble, sample and permutate sounds, structures and vocabulary out of the initial language into the single person languages. That would be like getting dealt an individual hand of linguistic cards out of an Adamic deck. Your groping attempts to understand wife and children were in this analogy an exercise of putting cards on the table and agreeing what structures, sounds and vocabulary would be selected for the family use. The wife being the main raiser of the children would be the dominant influence, hence we say mother tongue to this day, whereas the strongest man, even having adapted his own language to that of a compromise favouring his wife, would have been in a position to dictate the tribal language once tribes formed which would have started happening within a few generations. And eventually you would get supertribes with languages like PIE (I don’t believe in Nostratic but PIE no doubt did exist but for only a couple of generations at best before it started breaking up and the opposite direction of linguistic development began. The one we know and love from seeing how Latin gave us all the Romance languages, etc. But this has to be understood as the reverse swing of a pendulum initially pushed the other way at Babel.

      Were there some who could not cope with this? Who simply locked themselves in a room and rocked themselves to oblivion? Probably yes. But probably not the majority. Even if it had been the majority, it would not matter as they died off and their space on earth taken by the descendents of such who understood what the punishment had been for, who understood that their God had spoken, did not need to ask Him to speak again but just gone on with it like Geoff Boycott, putting in the runs and delivering Bablexit.


  2. The alternative title says it all. As the star rating describes it, magnificent post. I always enjoy reading your thoughts on these things. It gets on my nerves sometimes how Atheism, Evolution and science are somehow seen as the same thing. Most Atheists I know have never studied, or for that matter had anything to do with the science they claim refutes the Bible. Sort of like the professing Christians who have never read the Bible, I guess.

    When Noam Chomsky visited Oslo University, he shared his view on the origin of language. He thought the capacity for language might have evolved several times in humans, as a mutation in the brain, and gone extinct several times as well, before finally spreading in the population. I think it’s far-fetched, but I thought I’d share it since it’s relevant.


    • Chomsky is an intelligent man, as people go, but he is unfortunately not inspired by the spirit of truth. There are several cases where I would take issue with him, not on such observations he makes based on facts, but on how he interprets them, which invariably run out of the so-called rationalist consensus and therefore, in his attempts to make them consistent, he often gets completely back to front.

      Capacity for language as a mutation in the brain is an absolute classic. As if anyone could demonstrate human language appearing from nowhere in a community that happened to have all evolved a capacity for it by mutation but there was no reason why this should have been a survival trait since one person cannot make a language.

      Moreover, despite all the nonsense about opposable thumbs whites of eyes and all that nonsense, the single biggest feature that distinguishes humans from other creatures is the presence of language based thought. Given the length of time they give us, how could this feature not have emerged among other apes also, especially when it’s a no-brainer that it would have been key to our own survival, were evolution true.

      The human brain observably hates creating original language. As Chomsky being a linguist should know better than most, we hate to do it. We always think about where a word came from and what it sounds like and why it means that and isn’t just silly gobbledygook. This kind of linguistic brain would baulk at creating language from nothing. Even Volapuk and Esperanto, along with the bulk of other conlangs, take their stock from existing languages and simply slice them and cut them differently. And the fact is that among humans there are no half-languages. There are no races among the ones discovered, even the Tasmanians with their most primitive technology, that have shown languages not capable of generating complex thoughts of the kind shared with the rest of humanity.

      Another case where Chomsky seems to be barking up the wrong tree is when he says that something is lost from the brain at six years of age which means that after this time the child cannot learn languages as well as before. The observation is correct, but the reasoning is back-to-front. We don’t LOSE anything at six years old, what we gain is the ability to learn consciously, which means we switch on our conscious memories. As the conscious act of memorising is a short-term memory function, as soon as we attempt the learning of language with didactic means we lose the unconscioys approach to language acquisition which we had as children. The only way to retrieve it is to have a learning system which doesn’t require conscious memorization – the very reason why the Goldlist method works when done properly as that’s precisely what it aims to do.


      • Exactly. Chomsky is perhaps rightly called the father of modern linguistics, but everyone interprets the evidence (which is of course the same for everyone) through the lens of their own world view. Some even accuse him of getting old and stubborn about his theories, not wanting to change them to account for new evidence, but I don’t know if that’s true or not. I would guess there are many youngsters who would like to be the one to challenge Chomsky himself, and so would at least attempt to criticize his work.

        However, criticism is certainly due when it comes to language acquisition after the age of six. We gain, or learn, lots of other things when we grow up, and six years is the age for starting elementary school in many countries, including Norway. Children younger than six don’t (usually) go to school, and there could be a connection between school and the ability to learn consciously. The child starts school and is told that he is now learning. Then again, the age might be a coincidence, or the school age could be six precisely because that’s the age where children start learning consciously.

        I was a volunteer in the translation of a book called “How to Teach Your Baby to Read” into Norwegian some years back. I translated only one chapter, but I got a free copy of the book in return (the English original; the translated version sadly never got printed, because the original authors wouldn’t allow it). Since it’s not relevant to me in the foreseeable future, I haven’t read it, but it seems that the general idea is to take advantage of the child’s ability to learn unconsciouly (or rather, the lack of ability to consciously learn) to teach children as young as 2 years old how to read. Maybe I should read it simply for the insight into general acquisition of knowledge, be it language, literacy, or mathematics (which I would imagine a very young child could also learn; they never cease to amaze me).

        On the topic of Babel, a friend of mine mentioned that he had heard a Jewish interpretation of this even to mean that it was not the languages themselves that were confused, but rather the way in which people conversed, or something like that. Apparently it was because of the word used for “speech”, but I don’t know enough Hebrew to read the account yet. I do know that there are Jews that seek to unite the Torah with various other ideas (e.g. evolution), and this could be linked to one of those attempts.


        • I think that some children are certainly able to learn to read before six, but I wonder whether this is conscious learning or the result of some dextrous introduction by a parent. In my case I cannot remember the act of learning to read and yet I was measured at seven years of age to have a reading age of twenty-one. When my mother told the headmistress of the school that she didn’t want me to learn this silly teaching alphabet called ITA they had in those days (it was withdrawn of course and it’s a wonder authorities weren’t sued in widescale class actions over it) the headmistress pooh-poohed her and said that I had obviously remembered the books which had been read to me. So my mother said “could he already have memorised this morning’s newspaper?” and that’s what the headmistress proceeded to test me with. At that point, she kind of shut up. But I don’t remember how it was I got to that level and I am not sure it was even a conscious learning effort.

          When it comes to people rationalising away or giving “understandable” reasons for various miracles or divine interventions, there is usually something which shows that the rationalising answer doesn’t quite fit the point. So it is here. How would it be that simply changing the way people converse would mean that they would run away to all four corners of the globe? Humans were and remain social, apt to urbanise and stick together. What other than a fundamental confounding of language would have that effect? That’s why I cannot envisage anything other than a total linguistic mix-up, such that each person woke up that morning with a language as unique to him or her as the pattern of his or her fingerprints or retinas.

          If this is a problem to people, then too bad. If a person cannot believe in God being able and willing to accomplish that kind of intervention, what kind of a resurrection are they looking for? What kind of a new heavens and a new earth?


          • I know people, including myself, who learned how to read before starting school, but I don’t remember how I learned it. I do remember learning the alphabet, because I had written lines of letters on a piece of paper and asked my mother to read it, which she did. And it turned out that in this chaos of letters, I had written my first word, “gøy” (meaning “fun”). Then I really wanted to learn the alphabet well, and asked my father to write it out for me. I think at that point I started reading Donald Duck comics and Latin dinosaur names one letter at a time, which usually enabled me to understand what word it was, but I had trouble the first times I read double consonants. Soon, I could read the comics, and I had a big box full of my fathers old ones so I wouldn’t run out. It wasn’t until second grade that I got into reading books, though. I tried to read the Bible as well, starting in Genesis 1, but I don’t think I ever got to chapter 4. Incidentally, I also had a simplified Bible where I read the Babel account.

            I think it’s pretty easy for a child to learn how to read as long as the process is interesting and fun (like reading comics). It’s not done in a day, though. I have a Chinese friend who also started reading pretty early. She had books which had pinyin above the hanzi, just like Japanese furigana, which she used from she was around 4 years old, I think.

            I looked at the words used in Genesis 11; in the first verse, the words used are שָׂפָה and דְבָרִים the first means”language, speech, choice of words, lip” (according to and my lexicon, but the Wiktionary entry is probably Modern Hebrew. Also, Youngs Literal Translation uses “pronunciation”) and the second means “words”. Hebrew has at least two words for “language”: לָשׁוֹן (“tongue”, quite literally) and שָׂפָה. It is probable that the latter has different connotations and convention of usage, as it is very uncommon for a language to have complete synonyms. However, if the interpretation is by a speaker of Modern Hebrew, the connotations may be different, especially if it’s based on “gut feeling”. The most likely reading to me is still that it’s talking about language. If it doesn’t, then we have one language gradually developing into all the world’s languages, which seems unlikely to me.

            It is very true that trying to explain away the miracles of God doesn’t work well. There is no reason to believe that Christ’s resurrection is anything other than a literal one, and that is not less miraculous than the confounding of languages. If one takes everything in the Bible to be a metaphor or parable, then the call to repent makes no sense, nor does anything else, really. If God gave the early Christians the gift of tongues at Pentecost, then He would be more than able to give the people of Babel new languages.


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