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The Origin of Speeches: From the Language of Eden to Our Babble After Babel

 
History of the Idea of the Monogenesis of Language, (all languages from a single, created Mother Tongue)

Readings:

A. Genesis 11 and The Tower of Babel episode
B. Introduction of "The Word", pages 1-6

Recommended Readings:

a) [General introduction, reflecting the older thinking that there was no Mother Tongue:] Langacker, Ronald D.. "Language and Its Structure: Some Fundamental Linguistic Concepts" Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, N.Y., 1973

b) [Documents language superfamilies, helped prove the viability of the Mother Tongue thesis:] Ruhlen, Merritt,"The Origin of Language: Tracing the Evolution of the Mother Tongue" Wiley, N.Y., 1994

c) [Three recent authors who can accept a Mother Tongue, but one which developed and diversified with no divine assistance:]

1) Dunbar, Robin, "Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language"

2) Pinker, Steven, "The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language"

3) McWhorter, John H., "The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language"

 
Chapter One

The oldest passage in recorded human history about historical linguistics is Genesis 11:1. Naturally, it is the last place that historical linguists will look for answers to the mysteries of the existence and dispersion of human language.

The Millennium Bible: Genesis, An Unpublished Translation and Commentary, renders Genesis 11:1 thusly [non-textual treatment in brackets]: [No mere chronology, the Bible has completed the theme of Noahâs progeny and now gets to the how and why they got scattered throughout the globe:]

"At first, the whole habitable earth [from Edenic AReTZ] had its one divinely programmed computing language -- [Edenic, best demonstrated in Biblical Hebrew roots] with a unique and economical vocabulary -- [so, despite their numbers and racial diversity, all people were on the same page]".

In the familiar K.J.V., Genesis 11:1 reads: "And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech".

In the less familiar Hebrew it sounds this way:

"VaYiHee Kol HaAreTZ SaPHaH AKHaT ooDiVaRim AKHaDim".

Perhaps you can hear "whole" in KoL, "earth" in AReTZ, "speech" in SaPHaH, or even (with an anagram-like metathesis) German vort and English "word" in DaVaR?

If you can hear those echoes of Eden in the English words, it's all the more amazing that "scholars" or "scientists" could not or would not hear them all this time.

Fitting the historical movement of this chapter, most people first accepted the existence of The Tower of Babel (and its ramifications of an involved Creator), then modern linguists rejected it as a myth. Finally, contemporary linguists have come to accept an archeological Tower of Babel, and even the concept of an original global human language -- as long as there is no deity first creating, then "confusing" or diversifying tongues.

The premier evolutionists and linguists concede that human language and the uniquely human capacity for language is a mystery. M.I.T.'s William Chomsky, has recently speculated that the brain was hardwired for language by some sort of superhuman engineer. Middling academics and writers (see C in the readings above) still posit that humans developed grammars and vocabularies out of simian gestures and grunts...

from Isaac E. Mozeson, The Origin of Speeches: From the Language of Eden to Our Babble After Babel (2005)

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