Weltall

Don'cha know? George Lucas did all the moon landings! Now if only I could find that strip...

spin

The problem is: the real state of Israel is God made, as I understand the religion. So the man-made state cannot be the real thing, but is an abomination, for we have men trying to do the work set aside by God.

If you can get my drift....


spin

Dean Anderson

Who says that God didn't do anything about it.

At Babel, men built a tower and God cursed them so they would never again understand what each other were talking about.

At NASA, scientists launched a rocket and God cursed them so the rest of us would never again understand a word they were talking about.

Craig

GarColga

There is an alternate telling of the Tower of Babel story in a Christian era pseudepigraphic book called '3 Baruch' or 'The Greek Apocalypse of Baruch', in which the men actually reach the 'heaven' and try to chisel through it. The 'Lord' only confused the speech of the men involved.

Chapter 3

1 And the angel of the Lord took me and led me to a second heaven. And he showed me there 2 also a door like the first and said, Let us enter through it. And we entered, being borne on wings 3 a distance of about sixty days' journey. And he showed me there also a plain, and it was full of 4 men, whose appearance was like that of dogs, and whose feet were like those of stags. And I asked 5 the angel: I pray thee, Lord, say to me who are these. And he said, These are they who gave counsel to build the tower, for they whom thou seest drove forth multitudes of both men and women, to make bricks; among whom, a woman making bricks was not allowed to be released in the hour of child-birth, but brought forth while she was making bricks, and carried her child in her apron, and 6 continued to make bricks. And the Lord appeared to them and confused their speech, when they 7 had built the tower to the height of four hundred and sixty-three cubits. And they took a gimlet, and sought to pierce the heaven, saying, Let us see (whether) the heaven is made of clay, or of 8 brass, or of iron. When God saw this He did not permit them, but smote them with blindness and confusion of speech, and rendered them as thou seest.

http://www.piney.com/3Baruch.html

Hazel-rah

The development and differentiation of languages is a very gradual process. Ref. Latin to Spanish, French, etc. There was not a single moment in history when Latin became French. Language change is lots of minute changes involving thousands of speakers over periods of centuries and over vast geographic areas.

This has been common knowledge to linguists for a very long time, and any current linguistics text will explain it.

spin

Just to expand, the existence of Spanish, French and Italian, show the prior existence of Latin, English, Swedish, High German and Dutch all point to a common ancestor, nominally "Germanic", Hindi and Parsi point back to an earlier "Indo-Iranian" language.

Languages have been born and have died since the reputed time of a tower of babel. No-one now speaks Gothic, which came into existence after the emergence of a Germanic branch of the Indo-European family of languages. Imagine how a trunk can have many branches and each of those branches support other branches which naturally came along later. How can one fit the tower of babel into that scenario which fits all the data well, as does the data from other "trees", such as the Finno-Ugric family of languages, or the Semitic family. When did people start speaking the language of modern Ethiopia?


spin

Ratel

Thanks for your help. I still find it amazing that a person who is trying to be accepted into a doctoral program studying the evolution of languages can believe in Babel! Just goes to show the power of compartmentalization, I guess. I don't think I'll try to deconvert this person, though. When I tell Christian friends about this stuff I feel like I'm telling a kid there is no Santa Claus.

Didn't know about the alternative version in Baruch, very interesting stuff.

Hazel-rah

And to me, the development of languages and how it makes us different is not as interesting as how it makes us alike. The proto-Indo-European root of "star" is "str" (can't figure out the diacritics here, sorry -- pronounced like "stir," but with less vowel...)

Through the various and sundry forces of language change over the millennia, that root gave us "astra", "estrella", "stella", "etoile," and a number of other related words. So when you look up in the sky and say "star," you're saying essentially the same thing a human in the very distant past would have said when he looked up in the sky. It's a strange and powerful link, and maybe I'm the only nut who thinks it's cool, but I do.

Toto

I can recommend Roger Pennock's The Tower of Babel. It is primarily about creationism, but includes a section on language development.