If, as evolutionists claim, all of mankind evolved from the SAME primitive life-source, then how did we end up with 7,000 different languages? Did one gorilla get angry at another gorilla and decide to start a new language? I'm intrigued to know.
The Bible teaches that God created all the different languages at Babel... "Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech ... 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 11:7,9). It is far more reasonable to accept the Biblical claim that God created all of mankind's different languages; than it is to believe that some space-dust from a massive chaotic explosion somehow became life, and then took on intelligence, and then from the same evolutionary process ended up with 7,000 different languages. That makes no sense at all.
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I remember this article!
And, by the way, most species have complex systems of communication, language-like or otherwise. This is nothing but another medium of linguistic communication. It may be more versatile than, say, the bees' waggle dance, but that is not to say the latter isn't a method of communication.
Don't mess with a linguist, Sandusky.
Languages differences and similarities are entirely related to distances between populations. For the last 500 years the spread of English is entirely related to colonization and immigration.
There's no mystery here and there wasn't back in the time the Tower of Babel story was made up. Learned people have known about language/linguistic differences being related to distance before word one was imagined in your stupid Bible.
There were traders over 2000 years ago y'know, oh wait, you don't because you have no knowledge of REAL history, only ficticious nonsense.
Oddly enough, the evolution comparison is actually quite an apt metaphor for the way that languages work. They branch off from one another, and interbreed with one another. You can see the German and French roots in English, for example, and the Latin roots in French.
Go back to medieval English and you'll be able to see the ancestor to modern English. It looks very different, but has some physical similarities.
So yes, while it isn't the same process as biological evolution, the development of languages is an evolutionary process in its own way.
well, God did a thorough job with that one, I'd say, since dolphins,whales,parrots, crows and rooks have different languages and dialects too.
Actually it has to do with distance and time causing languages to become more localized and over time, more diverse. This is notable as even animals have their own regional..."dialects"
Also, as I recall, Babel happened because those citizens built a tall tower to try and reach God, and god gave them a dose of humility by creating multiple languages. Of course how we get away with building ever taller towers nowadays, not to mention flying beyond the atmosphere without further punishment is never addressed.
There are languages today that are younger than when the tower of Babel story took place - like ENGLISH, for example. That kind of leaves a GAPING hole in your idea that they were all formed at the same time, right?
1) Languages among humans and evolution between species are not connected.
My favorite part of the babel story is God's reason for it: humanity was working together to acomplish amazing things, so God destroyed the city and their languages so as to keep them weak and needy. That means that, if you take this story literally, God is the biggest enemy of humanity, and is solely responsible for billions of deaths due to differences in language. In short: your God is a dick, and you are a moron.
@John
"New languages develop all the time. The English of 1,000 years ago would be unintelligible to most English-speakers today."
Well at that time England would have been full of Germanic-speaking Saxons, and Celtic people speaking a close relation of Welsh.
Like so many things in Bible, the Babel story belittles and demeans history of human progress by simply stating "Goddidit".
Linguistics can be a very useful tool in learning history, for example.When no written records exist, it can be used to sort of backtrack the big exodus/ migration events.
Example: no-one seems to know for certain where us Finns originally came from -since we came here shortly after Ice-ages, there obviously are no written records, or even legends or sagas.
Linguistics is therefore the only way to find out(apart from genetics,which is another can of worms althogether).Finnish has only two related languages: Estonian(which is very similar) and Hungarian(which sounds like complete gibberish to us).So far no-one has been able to convincingly prove where we came from and how.
But I'm pretty sure we were not around Babel when all that tower shit went down...
The Bible teaches that God created all the different languages at Babel...
The Bible also teaches that humanity scattered across the earth and began speaking different languages before the Tower of Babel shit went down...
So, you know... don't take what the Bible says as fact, since one of those teachings has got to be wrong.
@Grimsoncrow
I have to contest that. There are many smaller related languages such as Saami, Karelian, Võro, and Samoyedic languages.
But they are not related to other European languages, which is correct :3
Try and get a Glaswegian, a Scouser, a Geordie and a Cornishman together and it is an exercise in mutual incomprehension. A Canadian friend of mine liked to point out that you could have the same effect by getting a Cajun, a Quebecois, a Moroccan and a Breton.
"The Bible teaches that God created all the different languages at Babel..."
That's not teaching, that's the printed equivalent of inane gabbling, aka beardie claiming, you gullible twit.
After about 10000 years, languages have evolved so much that it becomes impossible to know if they were originally related or not. Essentially you can't guess if the matches you're getting are just due to chance, old borrowing, or if they're really words that originally evolved from the same source.
You can also be thrown off by stuff caused by surface contact (which means all the languages of a region might have similar grammar and pronunciation but still be unrelated, such as Thai compared to Vietnamese).
That's why we can't make sense of Native American languages (the current classification has something like over a hundred different families plus many unclassifiable isolates) even though we can guess they made it to America somewhere between 15000 and 40000 years ago (though this is still an open question) and they're still very closely related genetically.
A similar phenomenon can be seen in Papua New Guinea where every small valley almost has its own language even though the population similar genetically. The population has settled long enough ago that languages have diverged and we can't make any sense of them.
Of course, some areas aren't like that (Europe, Africa) but that's due to different language propagation patterns.
So, Cockney English & Southern American English were both created at the Tower of Babel? And were spoken before the UK or US even existed?
You, uh... you might want to rethink that, Davey.
"Did one gorilla get angry at another gorilla and decide to start a new language? I'm intrigued to know."
Yes, sign language came into being when a pissed gorilla gave another the bird.
Jesus fudge eating Christ. This is some ignorance of epic proportions.
Okay, even if one is too willfully ignorant to understand the theory of evolution and abiogenesis, it is patently easy to research how language evolves. Linguistics is a thing. The history of language is not a mystery. How on earth is it "more logical" to assume that some god just went *poof* and pulled languages out of his ass when we have all this knowledge??
Confused?
So were we! You can find all of this, and more, on Fundies Say the Darndest Things!
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