mopc

Well, actually it doesn´t come chronologically before or after anything, it never happened, it´s just a just-so story for the origin of languages that had a different source then the Noah story but the Editor probably didn´t want to insert it in chapter 10, neither put it before it, so he just put it after 10, though it seemed awkward since the existence of several languages is mentioned in 10.

Seeker2000

Thanks for all your interesting answers. A good argument seems to be that there have probably been different languages before the Babel story was written down or before it is said to have taken place.

This is also interesting... I should have looked up Rawlinson on Wikipedia myself - then I would have noticed that he is an orientalist from the 19th century.

Anyway, there doesn't seem to be much support today for Rawlinson. Maybe his idea was that there are the Indo-European languages and the Afro-Asiatic languages and that Shinar lies somwhere in the middle between the geographic regions of those language families and therefore could be the place of origin of a possible proto-language.

As for the person I mentioned in the original posting, I'm not really arguing with him about this topic at the moment. It was just a small part of a longer text he posted. He is a Jehovah's Witness and the discussion is actually about whether the Revelation of John makes predicitions about current events (BTW, two other people, who are Christians themselves, agree with me that it does not and that one should look scientifically at those texts and see them in the historical context and they also think that they have been written by humans and are not the inerrant work of God). In that context he posted a longer text in order to show how precise the Bible is in the field of archeology and in other fields as well and to show who the author of the Bible is.

Gamera

Not at all. There is plenty of evidence that languages within a group are related. No evidence that language groups are related. As I pointed out Basque is apparently unrelated to any language on the planet. Sorry, the idea of a common origin to all language is pure unsupported nonsense.

J-D

Not the best choice of example. English has changed comparatively little in the last 400 years. Shakespearean English is different from any variety of modern English, but it doesn't differ from them more than they differ from each other. Understanding a Shakespearean play is not noticeably harder than understanding an English-language text from a different English-speaking country.

What is noticeable is that although English hasn't changed a great deal since Shakespeare, it did change a great deal between Chaucer and Shakespeare, and it changed out of recognition between Beowulf and Chaucer.

J-D

The way I see it there are two possibilities. One is that human language originated only once, and that all existing languages must therefore have originated by divergence from this original source, but over such a long period of time that the earliest traces have been completely obscured. The other possibility is that human language originated more than once independently, and that different groups of existing languages derived from these different original sources. As far as I can see, the evidence to judge the relative probability of these two hypotheses isn't available, and probably never will be.

Seeker2000

Regarding the question whether there is a common origin for different languages, well, at least there might be a common origin for some language groups, but of course there might as well be none. But maybe there once was some kind of proto-language which has evolved into completely different language groups over time. On the other hand, maybe such a proto-language or even proto-languages was/were of a rather primitive nature. Those could have evolved over time into languages and language groups that are much more complex, so that there would not be a real connection to the proto-language then and it would make more sense to say that the different language groups are not really connected by a common origin.

There is an article at Wikipedia about the Basque language. The only accepted link is to the Aquitanian language. There are some other suggestions, but those don't have a lot of evidence. Apparently the Basque language was already used in the 3rd century, according to a recent discovery which is reported on a web link from the article. This discovery also showed that there have been Christian communities in the Basque Country earlier than historians thought.

There's also an article about the question of the origin of language at Wikipedia. It is in need of attention from an expert on the subject and of references though.

Some quotes from that article:
I really doubt that the children of King James V's experiment spoke Hebrew... at least not without input from the outside. One would need more information about the experiment to comment on it though.

This sounds interesting, too. However, in the article about FOXP2 it says that FOXP2 exists in many animals as well... which would be strange, as animals usually don't speak.
But I'm no expert and this could simply be a far more complex issue... (well, it probably is.)

One has to connect this with the out-of-africa theory though. If the rise of human language depended on a certain step in evolution, I would think that this must have occured before homo sapiens spread around the globe... at least it sounds unlikely that this step in human evolution took place at different locations on the planet at the same time independently, unless someone has a good explanation for it.

Maps of human migration can be found e.g. at these links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:M...migrations.jpg
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Im..._migration.png
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bild:Sp...mo_sapiens.jpg

But maybe the formation of complex languages didn't depend on an evolutionary step, but rather on other circumstances. Maybe the transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture and permanent settlements was a key factor for the creation of complex languages compared to more primitive ones?

So maybe even Neanderthals had some kind of primitive language. The article also says that "several monkeys have complex differences in sounds to warn of different predators. These range from a generic water, land, or air predator warnings to sounds indicating specific species such as leopard." It would be interesting to know if monkeys from different geographic regions use different sounds...

Seeker2000

Another very interesting article I found at Wikipedia is this one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicaraguan_Sign_Language

Huon

It is primarily used by shepherds to communicate with each other over long distances. It was still used in Bearn (a region neighbouring the Basque Country, but speaking a romance language) around 1900. Another example can be found in the Canaries Islands, called Silbo Gomero (whistling of la Gomera island). I have other references in West Africa.

Alf

Sorry for being late to respond - I was cut off from internet for a while but now it is back up.

Err... There is plenty of evidence that languages have a common origin, i.e. that a language A and a related language B share a common origin.

I never said or meant to imply that there was at some point in time when there was a language that is the common origin of all languages spoken today. That idea is simply absurd. Even if there was such a language we would not be able to identify or reconstruct it and most likely there never was such a language.

My point was that there are languages today where we can identify a common origin and thus there is evidence that they have a common origin. For example the nordic languages share a common origin and further back the germanic languages share a common origin and even further back the indo-european languages share a common origin. Plenty of evidence for this.

Alf

Alf

Perhaps not but I would still place my bet on the second one. Multiple independent origins appear to me more likely. I.e. that the human species spread out first and then developed language in different places independent of each other. Of course, it is here a nit-pick what you mean by language. If you by language means "screams and gestures and facial expressions and grunts" then yes, we probably had a single common shared language origin but a language with words with meanings probably appeared after we spread out and therefore independently of each other.

Alf