Tower of Babel

[GB-GIL Trans-global]

Generally, while I do not believe that the Bible is true (while some of it is factual in my eyes, I don't think the whole thing is), I find many parts of it quite interesting.

I'll tell you an interesting story here:

When the Spaniards first arrived in South America, they were very surprised to find that the peoples there already had a story very similar to the Tower of Babel. All the different peoples of the world built a giant pyramid to reach the gods, but the gods got angry and punished them.

Personally, I think that separation of languages occured over a long period of time, and it has been proven that most of today's languages have only exist for 1000 years at most. (some, such as Hebrew, have been revived, while there are others, such as Arabic, that have been kept alive by a religion)

Imagine, in a world without mass communication: Americans obviously speak slightly different than British. However, without mass rapid transportation and mass communication, these two different dialects would change from merely national varieties to nearly separate languages, and eventually they would become just that. Take a look at Portuguese in Portugal and Portuguese in Brazil: they're now regarded as two separate languages. In Portugal, the more informal types of speech dropped out of use completely except as perjoratives, and now everybody uses all the time what was once the informal. However, in Brazil, the informal has been popularised and has been kept well intact as a part of the Portuguese language. For this reason, most of the time companies that are localising their products into many languages will make a Brazilian Portuguese version as well as a Portugal Portuguese version.

The less easy it is to communicate across large distances, the faster languages separate.

 

[Avatar]

read and agree


damn, we need history forums over here

 

[Pollux V]

You're right, Geebee, the same problem is in space colonization, using our current methods and proposals. A whole new culture would develop on any world outside of our own solar system, almost like an alien race entirely, without an ansible-like device to keep us hooked up. Since humans probably all originated from the same place (southern africa?) then at one point we did all have the same language, but there weren't too many of us anyway so I doubt anyone really thought of creating a new one until they went their separate ways.

What intrigues me is the radical difference between most latin-based languages and asian-like languages. As far as languages go, I think they're at the opposite ends of the spectrum. There's also various dialects used in Africa and the Aboriginees have a language of their own, to name a few, so where there are differences [between similar languages] the differences are radical. The reason for this is isolation.

 

[GB-GIL Trans-global]

You're right, Geebee, the same problem is in space colonization, using our current methods and proposals. A whole new culture would develop on any world outside of our own solar system, almost like an alien race entirely, without an ansible-like device to keep us hooked up. Since humans probably all originated from the same place (southern africa?) then at one point we did all have the same language, but there weren't too many of us anyway so I doubt anyone really thought of creating a new one until they went their separate ways.

Generally, it's thought that humans came from Central Africa. As for starting with the same language, linguists do not agree on that as it is not known for sure whether humans had already spread apart before language developed. As for people thinking of creating new ones-- that made me laugh. Nobody "created" their languages, they all arose out of their ancestors. After separating, I highly doubt that Mr. Ancienthuman said "hmm, I think I'll make a new language", the first time somebody ever CREATED a language was in the 1700s, and created languages have been very unsuccessful.

What intrigues me is the radical difference between most latin-based languages and asian-like languages.

Generally, you're erroneous here in saying "asian-like languages", there is no such thing. In much of Asia (ie India, Pakistan, Iran), there are spoken languages that are in fact very closely related to Italic languages (the Romance languages are Italic), while in other parts of Asia, there are spoken Sino-Tibetan languages, other parts of Asia have Austroasiatic languages, others have Austronesian, some places have Altaic languages (Turkish, most languages of Central Asia including East Turkestan [xinjiang uyghur]), some have Caucasian languages (languages of the Caucasus, not languages of non-Asian descent), and some have languages from even more families. Generally, when people say "asian-like languages", they refer to Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, but even these languages are very diverse-- Japanese and Korean are distant relatives of the Altaic family, with only slight similarities to each other in vocabulary, and Chinese is not one language but quite a few, and forms a whole branch for the Sino-Tibetan family (Sinitic).

So please be more specific what you mean when you say "asian-like languages"

As far as languages go, I think they're at the opposite ends of the spectrum.

Totally wrong. If you were to actually make a spectrum of languages, you'd find that Chinese, Japanese, and Korean actually came quite close to Latinate languages, with languages of the Carribean and central Brazil at the extremes along with languages of Siberia, Northern Canada, Greenland, Aboriginal Australia, North America, and to some degree African languages.

There's also various dialects used in Africa and the Aboriginees have a language of their own, to name a few, so where there are differences [between similar languages] the differences are radical.

Dialects is an understatement. There are hundreds of languages used in Africa, most of which are not recognised by their local governments (most local governments opt for English, French, or Portuguese as official languages because there is usually no single language unifying their population, even 10 would not bring most countries together, with the exception of the Arabic-speaking countries of the northern third of the continent and the tiny Swahili block in the east), which can be divided in the most conservative opinions into 30 groups, in the most radically optimistic views there are 4 or 5 groups.

As for Aboriginees, I'm not sure to whom you refer. Generally, I will assume you are referring to the aboriginal population of Australia. Aborigine is not to be capitalised, it isn't the name of a peoples. There is no one aboriginal language in Australia, but rather hundreds, and if I recall correctly, the most spoken few have only 150,000 speakers.

The reason for this is isolation.

Generally, for linguistic isolation, the most interesting case in my mind is Afrikaans, one of two Western languages of South Africa. The story goes:

In the 16th century, the 1st Dutch settlers of South Africa came speaking their 16th century-Dutch. Since they lived in the southernmost part of Africa, they had zero contact with their families back in Holland (the Netherlands). They developed a different language, although today the two can be understood between each other very easily, they're most definitely different languages. The Dutch in South Africa are no longer Dutch, they're Afrikaaners. They have a distinct culture as well as a distinct history and language. They have about the same amount of speakers of their language in South Africa as do English speakers. Most Afrikaans speakers are actually black South Africans or mixed persons, and during times of apartheid the Afrikaaner population was the more radical part as far as their opinion on blacks.