Sabine Grant

Hello Smartblond.... That and multiple personalities disorders could fit the definition of " demonic posession" because of how they affect the behavior of the person.

For example, auditive hallucinations in schizophrenic subjects.... the " I can hear voices and they are telling me to do this or that". My mother used to have such hallucinations... a voice insulting her. She even claimed to feel a hand pushing her to make her fall. Each time she did fall. It is a terrible illness.

If you have seen the movie "Sybille" ( sorry for the spelling not sure) she would even have different voices as her different personalities " took over". If I were to believe that demonic activity is present in any mental illness IMO that disorder would be a candidate. Maybe someone has more info about it or knows a link which explains what medical research has been done on multiple personalities disorder.

philechat

Granted. However, due to our daily interaction with people from all cultural and linguistic background, it is possible that our unconscious registers some of the foreign languages we were exposed to. It may even contributes to the reason children learn faster in the field of languages--they are unconscious learners and play with languages without consciously referring to their rules.

Also, it is easy to imitate the phonetic sounds of another language, especially in the presense of those who do not understand the language. For example, I am quite able to give English a Chinese or German accent, if I can capture the features of Chinese or German. So "speaking-in-tongues" might not be quite so "miraculous" as people have claimed.

Sabine Grant

Hi Philechat.. Good point. It is possible I guess that one may register unconsciously a foreign language. I doubt it can lead to fluency though... I learned 3 foreign languages, two I can claim to be fluent and I must tell you that it necessitated full conscious awareness to acquire that knowledge on my part. Years of study and years of total immersion in the culture which uses that language.

The times I have been exposed to what is called " speaking in tongues", I never heard a known language. It was more so a mono syllabic repetitive language that I could not identify as a known tongue. The closest I came to a known language is that it phoneticaly resembles hebrew or arabic. Having studied linguistics, I cannot help but pay attention to the structure of a language. Even though I am a christian I cannot support the claim that the speaking in tongues is a supernatural phenomenon.
But the fact that I found the same patterns and phonetical resemblance in many individuals located in various areas who had no way to communicate with one another is what I cannot explain in a rational manner. It always sounds the same no matter where I was and who was "speaking in tongues".

The propagation of a language necessitates communication between individuals. How that mysterious tongue can have similarities within groups of people who do not communicate with one another and are of different native languages or cultures is what gives me the sense that it could be " supernatural". How the same sounds can be echoed and sounds formed perfectly by vocal organs not trained to form that sound... it defies anything I have studied.

I do not know if you can speak other languages but it takes some training of the vocal organs to form certain sounds alien to our native language. For example, I have found when I teach french to an anglophone that forming both the French sounds " u" and " r" necessitates exercises almost similar to speech therapy. It simply does not fit what I have experienced in terms of teaching phonetics as I was able to hear the same sound alien to that native coming from the mouth of another native.

One may explain the phenomenon by saying that it propagated via medias and people started to imitate one another consciously. But it happens even in remote areas of the world where medias have no impact on people. And it still does not explain the formation of sounds which would normaly require a new conditionning of the vocal organs.

Maybe someone in this forum who may have some linguistic knowledge has some suggestions to share.

Gurdur

I am (or at least was) a professional academic linguist. I am aware of one study, done by an American linguist, which showed that phenomena of glossolalia (speaking in tongues) possessed on average even less phonemes than Hawaiian, which is difficult.

Meaning that glossolalia is simply repetitive random connections of mostly vowels, with only a few consonants included, and no great information transmission whatsoever.

BTW, that linguist was a Christian who did not deny there might be some spiritual or other validity to the whole experience; she simply though. after stringent analysis of many, many utterences, could not find any meaningful signal in it all.

Sabine Grant

I agree with her analysis that there is no pattern which indicates a meaningful signal. Did she notice the same phonetical phenomenon I noticed? that is the reproduction of sounds alien to the native language. Does she have a book or web site... how could I access her study?

Could the similarities I noticed in the repetitive phonemes among various individuals not connected, be the product of self invented language where we will find a choice of vowels and consonnants based on what the individual is most familiar with? The letter "Z" for example is not so used in certain languages... therefor maybe "B" would be the better choice. I noticed the reoccurance of the sound " sh" for example. Very common in English. Ditto French. Italian. Arabic.

It would be interesting to conduct the following experiment to determine if the individual invents the "tongue" thru some type of transe still using the same sound pattern as his native language or if the individual is actualy using his subconscious with the ability to produce sounds not familiar to his native language.

It would take a few volunteers from different cultures and to ask them to invent a language following the same mono syllabic and phoneme pattern as glossolalia( people who never heard glossolalia before of course). See if the same similarities occur. They would also have to follow the same rythm which is usualy very rapid.

It is interesting also that "tongues" do not have a written expression. Any thought on that?
A bit off topic but since I have a linguist willing to discuss "shop", were you familiar with Esperanto?

Amos

Glossoalia is just the stream of words flowing over the adams apple where reason is interjected into our vocabulary. So it is just nor-rational or non- conventional language. Interpretation is possible through the spiritual unity of the speaker and listener but is often contradicted between two interpreters.:boohoo:

Sabine Grant

Adam's apple... but you guys still have it stuck in your throat.. I do not!
Ha... the wisedom of Paul insisting that there be one person at a time speaking in tongues with one interpreter at a time. ( ref. Cor). I guess he was aware that multiple interpretations would result in confusion. Those folks ought to follow the "rules"....

Gurdur

There I think you're way off. It's the Bridey Murphy syndrome --- people hear "alien" phonemes all the time from media etc., then when they get into glossolalia they just reproduce it.
FYI, most phonemes in the rather large body of utterences she recorded were from familiar speech --- no-one seemed to come out, for example, with Abkhazian consonants (Abkhazian is a language remotely related to Georgian, another Transcaucasian language, and hardly ever appears in the mass media of Western countries). A pity ! Quite boring, in fact.
I'll look it all up for you. It'll take me a bit of time, but I'll do it and get back here.
Now you're getting there.
You'ld find that glossolalia would follow different rules among Transcaucasian language speakers than among Anglosaxon speakers.
You can transcribe glossolalia in the standard linguistic phoneme (IPA) transcription symbols.
I have encountered Esperanto, and a couple of other invented languages, but I do not actually speak them.
Esperanto is heavily based on the Romance languages (French, Latin etc.) and therefore is rather boring for me, since I --- like other academic research linguists ---- prefer to examine languages from several different families at once, and not only Indo-European.

Mad Kally

At my mom's 10000+ strong Charismatic church they just make one syllable noises like, la la la la ah ah ah ab ab ka ka ka la la la da da da da ba ba ba ba, seriously.

Amos

The first page of "Finnigans Wake" is full of it.