Talk:Tower of Babel

Babel
Babel is the sound your tongue makes when it doesn't know what it is trying to say. Many people say speaking in tongues is a form of "babel"-ing, but really you are speaking through the spirit of the Lord.

This section is wrong in so many ways. Would anyone object if it were deleted?--All Fish Welcome 04:25, 21 April 2007 (EDT)

Linguistics

Learn Together, some of the changes you made dramatically change the meaning of what I added (though I fully expected there to be some wording issues in that first draft). I'll get to those in a sec, but what bothered me most was this unreferenced claim:

The Tower of Babel would have predated the earliest known human civilizations as well.

Please find an acceptable reference for this claim. Most attempts at placing the tower in history that I have seen place it in the context of Sumer, Akkad, Assyria, or Babylonia.

Other comments:

Some modern linguists now trace a number of language families to languages believed to be reconstructed at the time of the earliest known human civilizations or possibly before.

This sentence gives me the following impressions. First, "some" implies comparatively few modern linguistics accept this when in fact I doubt you could find a book on historical linguistics that doesn't accept the genetic model. Second, "or possibly before" is unnecessarily qualified. Proto-Afro-Asiatic could not have been spoken concurrently with its daughter languages. So at least one reconstructed language necessarily precedes the first great civilizations, as most archeologists divine them. The new phrasing allows reads as if linguists were doing the reconstruction "at the time of the earliest known human civilizations".

Linguists today are aware it is difficult to reconstruct the mother language for which there is no direct evidence

While this is true to some degree, it completely changes the meaning from the way it was written before. I meant to state that reconstructing a mother language from reconstructed daughter languages is difficult. That's where the controversy lies, when a linguist makes that leap of faith in the data.

To support the Biblical account, the Creation Museum in Kentucky reports the following:

I struggled to phrase this sentence correctly, but this won't work at all. It completely eliminates the point of the second paragraph: that some Christian sources are making states that are opposite of the Christian claims in the first paragraph. (Group 1: because we can reconstruct mother languages, we have proof that Babel existed. Group 2: because we can't reconstruct mother languages, we have proof that Babel existed.) Finally, why was this sentence removed?

Few modern linguists would accept that these families' "recent" origin is evidence that they appeared suddenly or all at once, but that the limit on reconstructions is an inherent failing of the comparative method

I know its not phrased as well as it could be, but as it stands, the claim made by the Creation Museum goes unchallenged when I doubt any linguistic I work with would accept it at face value or see it as anything but a severe distortion of current knowledge. I'll await a reply before I continue editing.Mirror 14:01, 11 July 2007 (EDT)