Did Our Languages Come From the "Tower of Babel"? - DIFFERENT LANGUAGES, DIFFERENT THINKING

The Bible account says that at Babel, God acted to "confuse their language that they may not listen to {"understand,"] one anothers' languaghe." (Genesis 11:7)  As a result, the workers" left off building the city"  of Babel and were scattered "over all the surface of the earth."  (Genesis 11: 8, 9)  Thus, the Bible does not say that alal modern languages can be traced to a single "mother tongue."  Rather, it describes the sudden appearance of several apparently fully developed new languages, each capable of expressing the range of human feeligng and thought and each different and distinct from the others. 

What about the language  groups of the world today?  Are they fundamentally similar or different?  Congnitive scientists Lera Borodisky wrote; "As linguists probed deeper into the world's languages (7,000 or so,  only a fraction of them analyzed), innumerable unpredictable different emerged."  Yes, although tongues and dialects  of one language family, such as Cantonese and Hakka in southern China, may be similar to one another, they are fundamentally different from those of another language family, say West Catalan or Valencian in Spain.

Languages shpe the people think about and describe the world around them -color, quantity, location, direction. For example, in one language a person says, "There is a bug on your right hand." But in another language. one would say.  "There is a bug on your southwest hand."  Such differences would be confusing, to say the least.  No wonder the builders at Babel found it impossible to continue their project.

Next time: Did Our Languages Come From the "Tower of Babel"? - GRUNTS OR COMPLEX SPEECH?

From the jw. org publications