How many languages?

cheeseman

Was there really just one language before the Tower of Babel shinanigans?

What do scholars make of this?

Cheers.

cheeseman

When I say scholars I mean bible scholars going solely on the scriptures.

Are there contradictions with this whole story?

I'm not referring to those who study linguistics who thoroughly trash the accounts from a scientific standpoint.

Leolaia did some nice posts about this topic a while back, perhaps she will notice this thread and elucidate but as I recall the story in Genesis is a convergence of two Sumerian myths. One about the origin of languages and the other about the building of a tower, perhaps that that really did exist in Babylon or that which was abandoned in Borsippa. The newly created myth was a separate unit from the narrative where it is located now which creates some contradictions.

Leolaia

Yeah, the story of the confusion of languages is paralleled by the Epic of Enmerkar, which knows nothing of a tower, while the story of the building of the tower is found in the Enuma Elish, which relates the building of the temple of E-sag-ila (= the ziqquart in Babylon), with almost verbatim agreement with Genesis, but which knows nothing of a confusion of languages. Similarly, the story in Genesis seems to weave together two parallel stories, one concerning the gathering of all humanity into one city (Babel), which prevented humanity from being spread about, and Yahweh confused the languages (pun on Hebrew balal "confuse") so as to scatter them about. The other story relates the building of a tower, which had an altogether different purpose: of ascending to the heavens. Then Yahweh came and destroyed the tower by blowing a mighty wind on it and casting it down to the earth. This ending is missing in the biblical version, but it extant in another versions, which sometimes include a corresponding pun....i.e. that is why the land is called Shinar, because that is where the tower was "overthrown" (cf. Jubilees 10:26, and note that the Genesis 11:2 mentions "Shinar").

As far as the original question is concerned, if one is concerned only what the text itself claims, it states point blank that "all the earth was of one language" in v. 1. So that is what the text really claims. While the Table of Nations in ch. 10 does mention separate tongues and nations, it is an overview of the descendents of Noah through several generations and is not necessarily intended to be understood as chronologically prior to the Babel narrative in ch. 11, just because it precedes it. It is of a different literary genre, simply a list showing how humanity arose and whence the nations arose, that interrupts the narrative itself. There is the brief pericope on Nimrod in ch. 10, which refers to the building of Babel which itself is described again in ch. 11.

peacefulpete

Merry Christmas Leolaia!

Leolaia

Yay!!! Happy Festivus, PP :)

fahrvegnugen

Yay!!! Happy Festivus, PP :)

Yes, I love it! "A Festivus for the rest of us."

dorayakii

Was there really just one language before the Tower of Babel shinanigans?

I'm not referring to those who study linguistics who thoroughly trash the accounts from a scientific standpoint.

Although i don't believe in the Bible as any sort of reliable historic record, and no matter how much i would like to, i have to admit that it is not possible for linguists like myself to "thoroughly trash" the idea of a single language. When 19th century British colonists went to India, they were surprised to find that the Indian languages closely resemmbled the already catalogued Classical Latin, Ancient Greek and the Early Germanic and Slavic tongues. They proceded to start categorising languages worldwide and the work even today is not done.

There are more than 100 language super-families in the world. So that means, 100 different "proto-languages" which are the common ancestors of all studied and recorded modern and historically known languages, but even that relatively small number, (compared to the estimated 6000-8000 identifyable languages in the world) is being reduced every day as common roots between langugaes previously thought to be unrelated, are found. So linguistically it is impossible to prove whether Babel existed or not, and it is almost equally difficult to ascertain whether there was one single language used by a single tribe of hominids and from which all the "proto-languages" emerged, or whether in fact the proto-languages evolved independantly (or were created by a god who wanted to spread abroad a large group of rebellious, tower-building people).

The main problem is that language was already evolved and complex before the age of recorded history, so it takes a genius, code-breaking mind to cross from the period of recorded history into that of pre-history... (may i just add, that proto-languages were more complex in certain ways and less in others, but i won't go into that now, i could write an essay on why the famous section with the Evolution vs. Creation schema is gravely wrong).

As a side note, the largest super-family is the Indo-European family which includes English, French, Spanish German, Hindi, Bengali, Welsh, Irish Gealic, Greek, Czech/Slovak, Russian etc. etc. etc. This language super-family boasts approximately 3 billion speakers worldwide, more than half the worlds inhabitants speak an Indo-European language.

Surprisingly as it may seem, the fact that they belong to a lanuage super-family, shows that these languages all came from one tracable source, as is attested to by the word "bear" (to carry), in many of those langugaes: Gothic "bairan" Old Englsih "beran" Russian "bere-" Old Persian "bara-" Sanskrit "bhara-" Greek "pherein" Latin "ferre"... Surprisingly, most words and roots can be traced like this and a theory of the oldest know form of a language can be reasonanbly surmised. This is called a "proto-language" and there is one for each super-family of languages.

(On a slightly biblical note, the ancient and extinct Hittite language is the oldest recorded Indo-European language. It is interesting to note that the word for "water" in Hittite was "watar" and the word for "to eat", was "ettsa"... )

The second largest super-family is the Sino-Tibetan super-family, which includes Mandarin, Cantonese, all of the Chinese and Tibetan dialects and around 250 other languages and dialects of East Asia.

The Afro-Asiatic Family (Hebrew, Arabic, Berber, Ancient Egyptian and the other Semitic and Cushitic languages), and the Niger-Congo Family (most of sub-Saharan Africa) take up most of the rest of the space on a language families map.

Other language families include the Uralic Family, the Altaic Family, the Malayo-Polynesian Family, the Caucasian Family (not white people, but the mostly muslim inhabitants of the Caucus mountain range), the Dravidian Family (Tamil and other south-east Indian languages), the Austro-Asiatic Family (Aborigine), the Eskimo-Aleut Family and several Native American language superfamilies.

How many languages?

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