conkermaniac

Can someone explain to me how Chapter 10 of Genesis says that Japheth was the father of all whites, Ham was the father of all blacks, and Shem was the father of all Semites? And if this is true, where do the Asians fit into this scheme, exactly?

Heathen Dawn

Japheth was the father of all Mediterranean Europeans. Among his sons is Javan, which means Greece.

Ham was the father of the Egyptians and Kushites (Sudanese) - all North Africans.

Shem was the father of the people of the Near East.

Now this was the world known to the ancient Hebrews. So the Northern Europeans, Southern Africans, Chinese, Amerindians and Australians are unaccounted for.

It's a favorite point of contention for me. When I was an Orthodox Jew and young-earth creationist, I kept pestering my rabbis with the question of the races. None had a satisfactory answer. It was the first step of my rejection of Torah inerrancy and, by extension, Orthodox Judaism.

The Bible has lots of things like that. Take the name for the Mediterranean Sea, for example: hayyam haggadol, meaning "the Great Sea". Surely the creator of this planet would know better than that?

Or the Global Flood. The reason the flood is "global" is that it seemed to engulf the whole known world. It was "worldwide" in the sense of that day, and local according to our knowledge of things.

Or the "two great lights", the Sun and Moon. The creator would know that neither is very great (compared to other STARS, which in the Bible end as little pinpricks stuck into the firmament), and only one is a light. Another strike against the divine inspiration of the Bible.

Or the Tower of Babel. A flat-out denial of linguistic evolution.

Examples abound. All the more wonder how so many fools in the world keep believing that the Bible is the Word of God, despite all the evidence against it.

MortalWombat

So, you're one of those godless linguists, are you?

Heathen Dawn

Yep. Much more than I am a godless biologist. In biology I'm a layman, a total beginner, whereas I've been studying linguistics for more than a decade.

One Orthodox Jewish apologetics book I read actually said Hebrew is the source of all languages, the Adamic tongue itself. I already knew better than that. To be fair to the Bible, it doesn't say Hebrew is the original Adamic tongue, but commentators of the Bible (including the greatest Jewish one, Rashi) very early on decided it was so.

Braveheart

How various races, languages etc came about has always been a puzzle to me.

I have to admit that some fundamentelist Christians have indulged in a little 'licence' when pontificating on the origin of the races. Ham was the Father of Africans and because he 'exposed Noah's nakedness' Africans were consigned to be subservient to the whites for evermore. Don'y buy it myself but some believe it.

It's all a bit of a mystery to me.

We leave the UK, settle in America, and then we are speaking in a funny Yankee accent!! Beats me!!


b

Heathen Dawn

It's no mystery to me. The writers of the Bible just didn't know better. Their known world was much, much smaller than our known world. They might have got it right if they had been inspired by a creator the universe, but apparently they didn't. That rules out the Bible's being the Word of God.

Actually, Shakespeare's phonetic system was closer to US pronunciation than to modern British. American English is more archaic in its phonology than British English. The "Sweet Swan of Avon" pronounced "hot" the American way, not the modern British way.

DMB

If, Braveheart (hope you're not Mel Gibson in disguise), you listen to people from the West Country or East Anglia, you will understand where some of the American accents come from.

With regard to Hebrew being the original language, it seems that Calvin thought it very important that one should hear the Word of God in its original form (Hebrew for the OT and Greek for the NT). Apparently some English calvinists got so keen on this idea that they subjected their unfortunate congregations to hours and hours of readings in the original, which none of them could understand. This reminds me strongly of the attitude of modern islamic fundmentalists who insist that children learn the entire (Arabic) koran by heart, even though they don't know Arabic.

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. (I.e. the more things change, the more they stay the same.)

lpetrich

As to how different races come about, some features, like skin color, are clearly local adaptations. Dark skin is useful for keeping sunlight out when there is too much of it, and light skin is useful for letting sunlight in when there is only a little bit of it. For others, it's not clear what adaptive value they have -- if any.

As to how ethnicities come into existence, I'm not sure what the favorite theories are on this subject; looking for "ethnogenesis" did not help much. However, the last few centuries have seen the emergence of several new ethnicities:

(British Empire)
US-American
Canadian
White South African (British, Dutch/Afrikaner)
Australian
New Zealander

(Spanish and Portuguese Empires)
Nations south of the Rio Grande.

(20th-cy. Middle East)
Modern-Israeli
Palestinian Arab

Big nations like the US can have sub-ethnicities, like American Blacks.

This suggests contributing factors like:

En masse migration with weak connections to the original homeland.
Shared experiences
Desire to distinguish one's group from another group (Canada vs. US, New Zealand vs. Australia).

Sometimes, however, ethnicities do not emerge; the Ottoman Empire never developed a shared "Ottoman" ethnicity -- its members were always Albanians or Greeks or Turks or Arabs or Egyptians or whatever.

lpetrich

As to how different languages emerge, this happens as a result of different dialects emerging and changing enough to be mutually unintelligible.

And what is a "language" and what is a "dialect" is often a political question -- a language is a dialect with an army, as the old joke goes. Thus, Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish are close enough to be considered dialects of the same language, but they are treated as separate languages for political reasons.

As another example of interesting language politics, modern Norwegian has two main dialects, Bokmål or Dano-Norwegian, and Nynorsk. A century ago, when Norway became independent of Denmark, the latter was assembled from various dialects by a Norwegian nationalist who wanted to create a distinctive Norwegian language. However, Nynorsk did not catch on very much, and it continues to coexist with Bokmål.

Languages can change in a lot of ways.

Pronunciation can lead to different accents, and changes in pronunciation can cause some words to get confused. This may force the invention of new words and new grammatrical constructions to take over what had become confused.

New words are invented all the time, and old words sometimes go out of style. Often this is due to coining words for new items and forgetting words for old items, but words can sometimes replace other words with the same meaning. Words can also have their meanings shifted, sometimes in very odd ways.

Which also happens with grammatical constructions.

Here's one curious example: the old Germanic word for "mountain" survives in English mainly in the compound word "iceberg" (an ice mountain, get it?); the word in isolation has been replaced by an Old French borrowing (present-day French for "mountain" is "montagne").

Another curiosity of the Norman-Conquest Old-French borrowing period is that the names of the flesh of various domestic animals are borrowed -- beef, veal, pork, mutton, venison, as opposed to cow, calf, pig, sheep, and deer. However, to the Norman aristocracy, these flesh names had been the normal names of these animals (Modern French "boeuf", "mouton", etc.).

lpetrich

As a result, languages change over time, and versions with great enough time separation can become unintelligible.

We present-day English speakers can understand Shakespeare and the King James Bible OK, but Chaucer is more difficult, and Old English is essentially a foreign language.

But there is a "core" that does not change very much, and it can be used to work out distant linguistic relationships, relationships that reflect spreads of populations long before they learned how to write.

An important result is that many languages in Europe, the Middle East, and India are part of a big family called "Indo-European". A family which does not include such Middle-Eastern languages as Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic, and Akkadian. These are a separate family: Semitic.

This was only recognized in the early 19th century; before that, the idea that Hebrew was humanity's original language caused many people to try to derive the familiar European languages from Hebrew -- which involved contortions that threatened to completely discredit the field of historical linguistics.

The first hint of such a relationship, however, came about 2000 years ago when Roman grammarians discovered that their language had much in common with Greek, though they concluded that Latin is a descendant of Greek. But despite their interest in their own languages, neither Greek nor Roman scholars had much curiosity about the languages of those around them, meaning that they could not go much further.