When did the world develop many different languages?

by gumby 15 Replies latest watchtower bible

• 

  herk

  There is no contradiction here. Genesis 10:5 tells WHAT happened, and the following chapter simply gives the details of HOW it happened. This is shown by the fact that chapter 11 begins with the Tower of Babel incident and then elaborates on the same descendants of Shem who were listed in chapter 10.
• 

  cellomould

  This is a glaring contradiction...

  If God really confused the languages at the Tower of Babel, then how could the decendants of Noah have diverged linguistically and geographically and yet... remember how they diverged from a common ancestor?

  It takes a creative stretch of the imagination and quite a few steps of illogic to believe that story.

  cellmould
• 

  gitasatsangha

  I cant believe that people in the modern world take this stuff literally today. If there was a tower somewhere in the world that all the people lived in, and then got scatterd, a few scant thousand years ago, how do fundamentalist christians account for the fact that people were living all over the world and have been there for thousands of years. Even if discounting their own records, how to fundies account for groups like the Aboriginies of Austrailia, the Polynesians, .. Amerindians from Alaska to Tierra Del Fuego. Its ludicrous.
• 

  cellomould

  Human language evolved...a good parallel is that of birds

  In a collaborative study, American and Brazilian
  scientists have discovered that hummingbirds, parrots and songbirds
  orders of birds that are evolutionarily distant from one another have
  evolved remarkably similar brain structures in order to learn to sing.
  The finding, reported in the Aug. 10 issue of Nature, will not only
  help understand the evolution of song in birds, but also offer insights
  into language in humans.

  http://www.ibiblio.org/pardo/birds/archive/archive5/msg00554.html
• 

  Abaddon

  Contradictions in the Bible aside (really? never!), it's generally held that after 10,000 years there is too much change in languages to get reliable information on how they diverged and from what.

  Indo-European (the source of most European languages e.g.) is pretty reliably figured out, as this rather good article written up on someone's private website shows;

  http://www.geocities.com/Paris/LeftBank/6507/chronicle120.html

  Beyond that it is speculative, they can come up with groups that Indo-European came from, but there is a lot of supposition;

  http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-World_language

  Here's more of the details;

  http://www.zompist.com/proto.html

  And here is someone really taking the piss out of the methodolgy used;

  http://www.linguistlist.org/issues/6/6-438.html

  We just don't know if different proto languages developed seperately in different geographical locations based upon the grammatical hardwiring our ancestors brains were developing, or whether there was an initial proto language that was understandable by all whatever passed for humans at the time at any point.

  From that point however, linguistic drift (a surprising predictable thing) induced by geographical seperation of populations and change induced by environmental neologisms (different organisms/terrains require new words if they have not been seen before), or technological developments (like wheels) has given us what we have today.

  Whether the human race will unBabel itself in the next five hundred years is a very interesting question. By 2050 they estimate that 50% of the world population will be able to speak simple conversational English. Mother tounges can hold on for dear life, but if you see how many have died in the past century alone you have to wonder what population needs to speak a language before it is safe from gradual decay and extinction.
• 

  Kenneson

  Love is the language of the "heart."