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Talk:Tower of Babel (view source)

Revision as of 18:10, July 11, 2007

252 bytes added , 18:10, July 11, 2007

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<blockquote>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.</blockquote>

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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/historians define them. The new phrasing ~~allows~~ reads as if linguists were doing the reconstruction "at the time of the earliest known human civilizations".

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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/historians define them. The new phrasing reads as if linguists were doing the reconstruction "at the time of the earliest known human civilizations" rather than situating the languages in that time period based on archeological, genetic, and internal evidence.

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

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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.

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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. Reconstructing one language is the sort of task even students can work on, depending on the amount of evidence.

<blockquote>To support the Biblical account, the [[Creation Museum]] in Kentucky reports the following:</blockquote>

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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.)

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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 statements 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?

<blockquote>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</blockquote>

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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.

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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 or whose work I'm familiar 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.[[User:Mirror|Mirror]] 14:01, 11 July 2007 (EDT)

Mirror

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