Linguistic Diversity

Today’s Reading:

• Genesis 11:1-26
• 1 Chronicles 1:24-27
• Genesis 11:27-31
• Genesis 12:1-14:24

Faith-Stretching Verse(s):

• That is why the city was called Babel, because that is where the LORD confused the people with different languages. In this way he scattered them all over the world. – Genesis 11:9, NLT

Thoughts:
In an interesting article/bulletin put out by the Linguistic Society of America, Stephen R. Anderson says that one source puts the number of languages in the world at 6,809, and these languages are broken into 250 families of languages. But from a biologist’s perspective, he says, the similarities of all these human languages far outweigh their differences and distinguish them as a class from any other organism’s communication patterns to the extent that a biologist could say that they’re really just one language (http://www.lsadc.org/info/pdf_files/howmany.pdf, pages 3 and 10).

This seems to me to make the best sense if the Bible’s account of the Tower of Babel is true.

As the Bible tells it, all mankind originally came from one couple, Adam and Eve. And then, after a while, there was a flood that wiped out all mankind except Noah, his wife, and their children. They were all speaking the same language. And that continued until the Tower of Babel.

Whether you believe in Creation or not, doesn’t it make sense that humanity would begin by all speaking the same language? I mean, no matter what theory you believe, how many humans would there have been at the beginning? 1? 5? 10? And they would have needed to exist in the same part of the world, or humanity would have died out within the first generation. So you would think that they would have to communicate with each other.

And the benefits of communicating with each other outweigh the advantages of being unable to understand one another by far. Just look at what’s happening to our world today. The biggest languages are growing stronger because people are finding that communication leads to mutual success and prosperity, so everyone wants in on the world’s most widespread and useful languages. And the smallest languages are dying out as fewer and fewer people find them to be worth spending the time to learn.

So why would humanity start off with a united language and then divide into so many individual languages, let alone dialects, when being unable to communicate leads to misunderstandings and mistrust and war rather than to prosperity?

It would be one thing if all these languages seemed to be clearly related to each other. You might then be able to argue that the original humans just split into different groups and spread apart, then developed different accents, and over time the accents got to be too strong for mutual understanding. But there are around 250 language families. They share the same basic underlying linguistic foundation, but the language families themselves are completely different and unrelated in their sounds and grammars. Within this common human linguistic capacity that makes it possible for any human baby to learn any human language as it grows up, there are very real differences that are completely unrelated to each other. How do you get so much unity and so much diversity at the same time?

The Tower of Babel. God created man, as the Bible says. They all shared one language. But then one day God saw that they were not filling the earth as He had commanded them to do (Genesis 9:1). Instead, they were banding together to keep from being scattered (Genesis 11:4). So God decided to make humans become foreigners to one another to force them apart. The result? A history filled with different languages and scattered throughout the earth by their differences. A modern day where humanity is abandoning linguistic differences and seeking linguistic unity for the sheer benefits that come from mutual understanding and cooperation. Considering how important the ability to communicate is, why else would humanity have ever given it up besides the events that took place at the Tower of Babel?

How can I believe it? It just makes sense to me. How about you?

For an overview of this year’s blog, please see http://threequartertank.blogspot.com/2011/01/why-do-believers-believe.html.