DIFFERENT LANGUAGES, DIFFERENT THINKING

 The Bible says that at Babel, God acted to "confuse their language that they may not listen to ["understand," footnote] one another's" language." (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 all 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 feeling and thought and each different and distinct from the others.

What the language groups of the world today? Are they fundamentally similar or different? Cognitive scientist Lera Boroditsky wrote: "As linguist probed deeper into the world's languages (7,00- or so, only a fraction of them analyzed), innumerable unpredictable difference 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 shape the way people think about and describe the world around them-color, quantity, location, direction. For example, in one language a person says, "There is 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: GRUNTS OR COMPLEX SPEECH?

From the jw.org publications