Language and the Tower of Babel

This has been touched on in previous areas but there doesn't seem to be a topic about it yet.How do you (anybody) think language and the diversity of language came about?If humans just had big enough brains to figure out how to use their digestive and respiratory systems to convert grunts into complex communication, how do you handle the creationist attack that says this seemingly came out of nowhere?If humans (and language) were created by God, did language naturally evolve over the course of thousands of years, or did God suddenly poof all of linguistic diversity into existence in order to thwart the pesky humans who were trying to build a skyscraper and getting too close to his front door?If God created linguistic diversity, how do you account for the fact that language continues to evolve today and modern English is less than 1000 years old? And does that mean "universal" languages like Esperanto that try to unite people are sinful since they would be contrary to God's will?

Lack of substantiary evidence comes to mind. Also, that we now know God's front door isn't somewhere in Earth's atmosphere. Also, why this hasn't happened any time modern society has built skyscrapers. Hrm. Using Acts to justify Genesis via Holy Ghost Babel Fish seems suspect to me. But if you accept a priori that the whole Bible is inerrant truth given to man by God, you can probably infer internal consistency from it. For the sake of argument... otay. So, would you argue that had humanity never tried to build the tower of babel, everyone today would speak the exact same universal language that was imparted to Adam by God? What ramifications would that have on something like written word if language were partially spiritual? Except life?Edited by bernerbits, : todayEdited by bernerbits, : No reason given.Edited by bernerbits, : No reason given.Edited by bernerbits, : No reason given.

LOL well... Hovind's always good for a laugh I wonder if he really is that crazy or if maybe he just thinks deception is a means to an end vis-a-vis saving souls.Edited by bernerbits, : No reason given.

Interesting. But all known languages rely on phonemes which rely on sounds. Does this mean that proto-hominids used imagined sounds to represent thought in their heads even before they were able to produce such sounds? Not at all. I've tried this experiment many many times and it gets easier the more you practice. It gets easy to substitute word-thought with images, colors, tastes, smells, sensations, and nonverbal sounds. No doubt in my mind, but there are enough biblical literalists here that it's interesting to see how the sane ones resolve their beliefs with their reality.Edited by bernerbits, : No reason given.Edited by bernerbits, : No reason given.

How can you say that! Don't you know he's offering a million dollars to the first person who can disprove creationism? How selfless can you get? He's like a biblical James Randi! OK, sorry for the sarcasm. Might be some Hovind supporters on here. But he makes it so damn easy to make fun. Though that's not exactly stimulating of fruitful debate so I'll knock it off.

Those textbooks were put there by God and/or Satan to test your faith that the universe has only been around for oh say 30 seconds. Dammit, there I go with the sarcasm again.

D'oh. Aight. (/me dusts self off) So would you think deaf people think in hand gestures, assuming language is the basis of thought? Did Helen Keller think in Braille, Sign Language, or combinations of vocal positions and vibrations?I'm just working through the ramifications here. If some animal or another is born with a genetic anomaly that gives a somewhat more complex brain that enables higher thought via some form of internal context-sensitive symbolic pattern structure... then the immediate benefit is he can use "language" to reason with himself more clearly about finding food or a mate, escaping/foiling predators, etc. Obvious benefit so it propagates quickly. Do you think people who grow up as feral or neglected children create some form of internal language for themselves?There it gets sticky. For language to be useful in communication you have to be able to both make it and understand it. Though I suppose you could argue that with the ability to reason with it in your head, and the obvious ability of all mammals to communicate in some form or another, comes a natural ability to infer deeper meaning from communication. So I suppose natural selection would favor people who could translate those thoughts into meaningful actions. Though we clearly see this ability in other animals, especially when trained by humans, so maybe this kind of behavior is innate and is a form of exaptation.Anyway. I'm not totally convinced that language is the basis for all human thought but I know it's a popular school of, er, thought. I'll give you that language holds a commanding portion of most conscious thought, but I think subconscious thought deals more with stuff like patterns and associations, and maybe actually putting those things together to actually form something like language.

Macro and Micro. A distinction that doesn't exist. Man and monkey came from a common ancestor, not one from another. But this is OT.

OK. When did God decide that he was tired of hanging out in the earth's atmosphere and move the spiritual realm somewhere else less tangible (or at least further away)?On what evidence or study are you basing your claim that there used to be a spiritual realm hovering just out of our reach that God decided to move at some point in history, and when do you claim that God removed or relocated this spiritual realm?

Just getting over that one actually. Gave it to my girlfriend and now she's topic... topic... The physiology of even the dumbest neural network leaves no doubt in my mind that it's about concepts. Things turn on which turn other things on. It's about associating things with other things. It's just that the more gray matter you have, the more things you can associate and the more concepts you can fit up there.The nerve evolved as a means of having quick reflexes to advantageous/dangerous situations. But it also had the side effect of when you bundled a bunch of them together and timed the pulses just right, they could perform more and more complex reflexes depending on experience and context until you had something a whole lot like thought. (I simplify of course. A biologist may help me out here.)Converting concepts into actions is really not much more complex than: "Hungry" *look for food* "Apple" *eats the apple* "Happy" *sleeps*. Language (in addition to communication) seems to be a more abstract form of converting concepts into actions that relies on the cooperation of others to help fulfill our biological/reproductive needs. Humans (and Dolphins, though I haven't looked into that rigorously) seem to learn language instinctively, while animals like gorillas and parrots can still be taught to use language in limited fashion. Certainly. It's just very interesting to consider what environmental conditions favored something so intricate as language (let alone weird stuff like religion and music and our obsession with comfort and luxury), when "hungry, get food", "bad mushroom, no eat" and "tiger, run away" seem like they could suffice in evolutionary terms.Edited by bernerbits, : qt=qs

Job's not a patriarch. And this chart is totally off-topic.

Exactly what I was trying to get across but I just couldn't find the words

So, collective thinking. The ability to transmit and share mental concepts in a complex fashion with minimal lossiness in order to apply more brains to the same problem. What path would you suggest from mere symbolic representations of concepts to full-blown human language?

I wouldn't go that far. Have you ever had a problem in your head where you just had to "talk it out"? Natural language still has structure and that structure can be transformed and reduced like other more "pure" languages like arithmetic, so yes, there is some innate problem solving ability in natural language. As an amateur linguist and computer programmer by trade, I would ;-)

The process of linguistic evolution is anybody's guess right now. So wild speculation is fine.I would argue that that chain is good for building up data and planning, but I'm not sure that fully accounts for our current richness of language. Certainly what you've got there so far is easy enough to encode into something trivially machine-parseable.