Tower of Babel
According to Genesis chapter 11, all humans spoke the same language following the Great Flood of Noah. Instead of spreading across the earth, they settled together in the land of Shinar and built a city and a great tower out of baked bricks in order to make a name for themselves. [1]
And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech. And it came to pass, as they journeyed from the east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar; and they dwelt there. And they said one to another, Go to, let us make brick, and burn them thoroughly. And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for mortar. And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth. And the LORD came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men built. And the LORD said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech. So the LORD scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city. Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the LORD did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the LORD scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth. Genesis 11, 1-9 (KJV) [2]
Non-Biblical references
The Tower of Babel is mentioned in a number of other Apocryphal and Pseudepigraphical texts, notably the Ethiopian Book of Jubilees, and also in Rabbinic literature. A similar tale appears in the Koran, and a number of other cultures have similar stories[3].
Linguistic evidence
Some Christians[3] cite 18th and 19th century observations on the new field of comparative historical linguistics to support their claims that linguists believe all languages originated in a single language spoken in ancient Mesopotamia. Modern linguists now trace many language families to reconstructed languages spoken before or concurrently with the earliest known human civilizations[4] and most mainstream linguists are skeptical about attempts to reconstruct the mother languages of languages for which there is no direct evidence[4][5].
To support the Biblical account, the Creation Museum in Kentucky makes a different claim:
The Bible claims that God created a number of human languages at the Tower of Babel "according to their families". Nineteenth-century linguists argued that languages evolved slowly, one by one. Today, linguists recognize languages fall into distinct "families" of recent origin.[6]
Few modern linguists would accept that these families' "recent" origin is evidence that they appeared suddenly or all at once, but that the limit on reconstructions is an inherent failing of the comparative method[6]. Since the 1950s, many branches of linguistics have been dominated by the hypothesis that human language has a partially biological origin [4][7][8][9]. If this hypothesis is correct, then the original language (or languages) may have been spoken over 150,000 years before the present.
References
- ↑ http://creationwiki.org/Tower_of_Babel
- ↑ http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis%2011;&version=9;
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 http://www.christiananswers.net/q-abr/confusionoflanguages.html
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 John McWhorter. The Power of Babel.
- ↑ Language Log.
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 Language Log.
- ↑ Steven Pinker. The Language Instinct.
- ↑ Ronald Wardaugh. Investigating Language: Central Problems in Linguistics.
- ↑ Frederick J. Newmeyer. Linguistic Theory in America.