FAITH = Credulity? (Part 2)

LANGUAGES

I have always been fascinated with languages. 

There is something magical about them. By opening our mouth, uttering a few sounds with our lips in different shapes, we can communicate feelings, emotions, knowledge, an epiphany, even an entire world view directly to someone else’s brain. Even more extraordinary is that this transfer can occur through the written word and access dozens, thousands, even billion other brains, without our being physically there with them.

And then there is philology, the comparative study of different languages, which has helped us unlock the mysteries of Egyptian hieroglyphs and open the door to the world of the Pharaohs.

We take it for granted but language is still quite a mystery. How do we acquire it so quickly at a young age? And why have we got so many of them (over 6000)?

Anyway, if we have evolved, it's only logical to think that languages have started with grunts then gradually became more complex. It would also logically follow that this trend should continue.

But what does the most ancient recorded language reveal? Sumerian, the oldest written language (dated about 4000 BCE I believe), is more complex than modern languages with its infixes, suffixes, prefixes.

Also is language becoming more complex? New words enter language, but some turn obsolete and are dropped. Grammar stays generally the same. One would argue, however, that languages tend to be bastardised, rather than complexified. Abbreviations, lazy grammar and pronunciation, text-messaging language are preferred to the contrivances of correct syntax and fully formed sentences. Am guilty ov it 2. C wht I mean, dnt ya?

Joke aside, Ancient Greek which is one of the languages the bible was written into, causes problems to translate into our modern languages. Some Greek words do not translate. Take a simple word like “LOVE”. In Greek, there used to be 4 nuances of this word: "agape", "philia", "storge" and "eros". Most of us would only recognise “Eros”. Eros is just romantic love. There are 3 other types of love. As far as I know (correct me if I'm wrong) but we only have one word for "love" in English, French, Spanish or German. If we are talking of a less intense feeling, we have another word ("like", "aimer bien" "gustar" "mögen"). But we have no real translation for the other nuances. We have to deduce which type of love (friendship, family love or unselfish principled love) is being described by the context in which the word is used.

The trend I am seeing is simplification of languages. It doesn't seem to fit the evolutionary model.

Linguists are searching for the ancestor of languages, but they have not found a simple language with characteristics of all modern languages yet, however hard they have tried.

The bible’s reason for this is that God skilfully confused the languages in Babel, around the second millennium BCE. This means there was one language at the very beginning; then at Babel, God suddenly created several so people would have to disperse to the 4 corners of the Earth and populate it . It was not a gradual process; otherwise they would still understand each other and would have stayed in one place.

Mad thought?

Have you tried learning a different language? It's quite hard. You have to adopt different rules of syntax, grammar and pronunciation that generally do not seem to make sense, you just have to absorb them. This is the conclusion I have drawn only from my experience of Roman or Latin-based languages, which are considered to be the same Linguistic family..

But what about Arabic and Chinese? Where is their common denominator with our Roman alphabet? Why do some languages require writing from left to right and others from right to left? It seems far-fetched to think that all of these evolved gradually from one common language. Why do some languages have an alphabet and others have logograms, pictograms, phonograms or a combination of these? Did someone decide in each case that they were fed up with the universal way of writing and speaking and invented a completely new way? How did he/she convince people to embark on this mammoth task and lead them to success? How long would the education programme have taken and what would be the cost to the community?

I can imagine a riot about a smaller change than this. It’s human nature, we resist change. We need a pretty good reason to embrace it. And even when we do, societal change is usually slow unless we have no choice in the matter.

One would expect that we could find records of this change happening. But as is true with the fossils, languages seem to appear in a short period of time, fully formed, all different. No record of transitional period.

So far the linguists have no scientific alternative to the Babel account to provide and yet they reject it.

A last note: we tend to think of ancient civilisations as archaic in their thinking, not civilised. Maybe they were in some ways. Maybe they did not have our modern technology, maybe they didn't know so much about the universe as we do. But how did the Sumerians build their Ziggurats so efficiently without cranes, calculators and Computer-Aided Designs? What about the Egyptians and their immense pyramids? These were beacons of mathematical precision and architectural genius. Some of their work endured millennia. Maybe our ancestors were not as dumb as we think. In fact, I am sure they had insights that we have lost.

If you have read this far, I am impressed! Thank you!

And if you feel so inclined, go there where I finish off with a little piece on prophecies. I'll be talking about the Dead Sea Scrolls.

:)