GentlyFeral,
What you provided was an example of languages diverging from a common ancestor, which is common. This usually happens due to long periods of geographic isolation from the parent language population. Interestingly, this one method of biological speciation.
I was responding to the assertion that the current languages could have come from a mixing of a single language at the time of Noah. You can't just mix a language such as Hebrew and come up with something like Chinese. That would be a creation of a completely new language.
There is no evidence that all of the languages we see today came about from a supernatural mixing of a single language around four thousand years ago in the middle east.
rem
The problem of Noah's flood and the origins of the Indo-European languagues
by badboy 39 Replies latest jw friends
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rem
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stillajwexelder
And as the English/French/Spanish were very colonial look what happened. Yes Australian English is similar to Queens English and to American English but they are different and if we do not think in terms of human time spans but in terms of 100s of years American English in say 500 years will be quite a bit more different from Queens (English) English. It will have a number of Spanish, indigineous and Native American words and phrases. Similarly even today Mexican Spanish is different than Spanish Spanish - language evolves that is why the Old Testament is obviously not the work of Moses et al -- but the work of copyists and scribes and redactors
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Leolaia
I'm actually a linguist so I know about this stuff. As far as how the Society would answer your question, I think they can simply fall back on their usual ostrich excuse by saying that these calculations by linguists as just "guesswork", "riddled with assumptions", hardly anything to compare with the word of God on the matter. Oh course, when you actually trouble yourself to examine the evidence, it is not as easily dismissed....and the Society's position that all languages developed from c. 2270 BC onward (i.e. after the Tower of Babel) appears as the least likely of possible hypotheses. I know of no empirical evidence that would point an unbiased researcher towards so young a date and quite a lot of evidence indicating far, far more antiquity to language.
I grappled with this question as a Witness, and even more so with the historical question....can the Sumerian and Akkadian dynasties be squeezed into the few hundred years after the Flood, can the Egyptian Old Kingdom and early Chinese dynasties be squeezed into the period after "Babel," plus giving enough time for enough ppl to be born and enough time for them to hurry over to their locales around the globe? Then there's the linguistic evidence. We can compare words in various Indo-European languages, from Sanskrit in India to Hittite to Latin to Gothic to Celtic to Old Church Slavonic, and we can very neatly account for the sound differences between the languages and with ease reconstruct the original proto-words from the original mother language of the Indo-European languages. The situation is far from "confusion" -- the sound correspondences between the languages were so regular that Neo-grammarians of the 1800s described them as Laws -- Verner's Law, Grimm's Law, etc. None of the daughter languages preserves the original form of this language in its entirety -- Sanskrit has preserved the morphological case system more than Latin or Greek, Hittite preserved the laryngeals more than any of the other descendant languages, etc. But we know from ancient written records that Sanskrit existed by 1500 BC, Greek existed by 1600 BC (Mycenaen Linear B), Hittite existed by 2000 BC at the latest. And by 2000-1500 BC the languages were already very different from each other. The original protolanguage was spoken by 3000 BC at the latest, 5000 BC at the earliest. And we can similarly reconstruct other protolanguages, such as Proto-Uralic which goes back to the same period, Proto-Austronesian which goes back to 4000-3000 BC, and so on and so forth.
The biggest problem of all for the Society's view is that of Semitic and other Afro-Asiatic languages. We know that Akkadian, the language of the Babylonians and of the Akkadians before them, was spoken in Mesopotamia as far back as 2500 BC at the latest. The Akkadian kingdom of Sargon the Great goes back to 2340 BC. But the Akkadians were preceded by the Sumerians who had an altogether unrelated language and who had been living for hundreds of years before that. So we know that at the time Babel supposedly was built, there were two languages at least in the land. When I was trying to harmonize things, I placed the very first Sumerian dynasties immediately after the flood -- so Ham's Shem's and Japheth's children could begin ruling cities in Sumer about 20 years after the flood. That would give me about 80 years or so for all the pre-Babel Sumerian dynasties so that Babel could be built around 2269 BC and all the nations dispersed from thence. If I made the date of Babel any later, that would take away valuable time needed for the Egyptian Old Kingdom dynasties. But here's what made the whole endeavor collapse: We have inscriptions and burials from the first dynasty of Ur, which made concurrent with all the other dynasties, I placed rather immediately after the flood. The burial of queen Pu-abi had a great death pit of some 75 royal servants who were ceremoniously slaughtered. Is that something we would expect of a tiny population recovering from near total annihilation from a deluge?? But I digress.....
The Akkadian language, which goes back to the third millenium BC is quite divergent from the Northwest Semitic languages, of which Hebrew is a dialectal variety. Hebrew has lost many features preserved in Akkadian. The Ebla tablets from Syria attest the Northwest Semitic dialects as existing at least as far back as the third millenium. And then there are the South Semitic languages -- Arabic in particular, which is again divergent but consistently so. We can easily compare them and reconstruct the original forms of the mother language of all of them, and the amount of divergence between the languages suggests that they descend from a Proto-Semitic language going back to about 5000 BC. But that is not all. The Semitic languages are closely related to other Afro-Asiatic languages, including ancient Egyptian (which we know from texts goes back to before 3000 BC), Ethiopic, Hausa, and the Berber languages. The original Afro-Asiatic parent language then probably goes back to 9,000-7,000 BC. And some linguists controversially argue that Indo-European, Afro-Asiatic, and Uralic together all descend from another parent language which they call Nostratic, which would then date back to 10,000 BC or even earlier.
Like the historical evidence of civilization and the archaeological evidence of human settlement, linguisitic evidence points to far more time depth than the Society allows.
Leolaia
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RubaDub
How do you 'mix' one language?
Rem
Pig latin would be an example.
***** Rub a Dub
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Leolaia
Pig latin would be an example.
Pig Latin ain't a language. It's a rather a simple rule of metathesis for disguising the forms of words. That's it.
Leolaia
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RubaDub
Pig Latin ain't a language. It's a rather a simple rule of metathesis
That's exactly the point. The builders of the tower of babel hadn't been given the rule yet and so they got confused and pissed at each other and left.
***** Rub a Dub
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Valis
Language is hardly the only dilemma...the very concept of plant and animal life suddenly sprining up in such a quick fashion, added with the different racial mix of our planet pretty much discounts all that mess anyway. Oh and BTW how fast would it take less than twenty people to populate the earth? If the flood were a local event, then can we say there were still people on earth that Jehover didn't want whacked? blah blah blah..
Sincerely,
District Overbeer
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heathen
I vaguely remember reading something about archeologists having found some kind of plaque or something dated to the era regarding the tower of babel that stated it was the location of the tower . I think it may have been in a WTBTS publication . I suppose I will have to do a quick google search and see if I can find something .
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Valis
Someone else posted this a week or so ago, but I thought it mught be interesting to throw into the mix.. http://www.hindustantimes.com/news/181_482436,0008.htm
Submerged city may be older than Mesopotamia
Utpal Parashar
Dehra Dun, December 3A submerged coastal city near Poompuhar in Nagapattinam, Tamil Nadu, is the focus of a major expedition being conducted jointly by the Indian Naval Hydrographic Department (INHD) and the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI). Both the organisations are trying to piece together the city's past, which some noted marine archaeologists consider to be the birthplace of modern civilisation. The once flourishing port city is located about one mile off the Nagapattinam coast.
"We have been able to locate a section of the city at a depth of 7 m and will soon start operations to recover objects that will help ascertain its past," said Rear Admiral K.R. Srinivasan, chief hydrographer to the Indian government.
English marine archaeologist Graham Hancock, who conducted an underwater exploration in the area in 2001, believes that the Poompuhar site could be older than Sumeria in Mesopotamia, where modern civilisation is believed to have originated nearly 5,000 years ago.
The 2001 expedition was funded by Channel Four of Britain and Learning Channel of the US in association with the National Institute of Oceanography (NIO), Goa.
It led Hancock to surmise that the city could have been submerged by a tidal wave as high as 400 ft somewhere between 17,000 and 7,000 years ago.
Other experts like Glenne Milne, a geologist at the University of Durham, UK, agree with Hancock. Video footage of the site shows that the submerged city near Poompuhar was far superior to constructions found in Harappan sites.
Although NIO had conducted similar offshore expeditions in the area in the late 1980s and early 1990s ? and discovered objects like ring wells, brick structures and megalithic wares ? it did not evince much interest till Hancock revealed his findings.
The new venture by the INHD and ASI may put an end to the debate on the submerged city. It could also rekindle a new interest in locating other such submerged towns and shipwrecks along India's coastline.
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Tashawaa
Leolaia - thanks for the info. Ironically, I've been thinking of this very thing the past couple of days, but couldn't find any useful info via Google. Great post!