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Author | Topic: Language and the Tower of Babel | |||||||||||||||||||||||
Dr Jack Member Posts: 3514 From: Immigrant in the land of Deutsch Joined: Member Rating: 8.3 |
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. Society, I believe. The need to express not just plans and wants but express how others are thinking about them.
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bernerbits Member (Idle past 5973 days) Posts: 73 Joined: |
Job's not a patriarch. And this chart is totally off-topic.
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bernerbits Member (Idle past 5973 days) Posts: 73 Joined: |
What's more there is no evidence that language shapes thought ... and many simple demonstration that we don't think in language: ever not had the word to express what you're thinking? Ever come across a new word and realised it describes exactly what you wanted to say? Exactly what I was trying to get across but I just couldn't find the words
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bernerbits Member (Idle past 5973 days) Posts: 73 Joined: |
The need to express not just plans and wants but express how others are thinking about them. 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?
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bernerbits Member (Idle past 5973 days) Posts: 73 Joined: |
Language has no problem solving capability. 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.
If you're broadening the term to include all forms of symbolic representation, then it's a different matter As an amateur linguist and computer programmer by trade, I would ;-)
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Dr Jack Member Posts: 3514 From: Immigrant in the land of Deutsch Joined: Member Rating: 8.3 |
If you're happy with wild speculation...
The base level is an immediate communication: "Eagle!"The next level is memory communication: "Fruit this-way" Then you have planned action: "We-go [gather] fruit this-way" Directed action "We-go attack Bimbim" Temporal offset "Soon we-go attack Bimbim" Command "Soon we-go attack Bimbim; tell others" Information "Earlier Bobo attack Bimbim" Animals will lie to misdirect others, for example making false alarm calls to get others to drop food, and are capable of distinguishing the caller and acting differently according to who said it. If you're communicating with temporal or spatial offsets so that the validity of a statement can't be directly determined so knowing who said it can be valueable. And you're up to "Migo say Bobo attack Bimbim earlier." Edited by Mr Jack, : No reason given.
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bernerbits Member (Idle past 5973 days) Posts: 73 Joined: |
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.
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Vacate Member (Idle past 4629 days) Posts: 565 Joined: |
but not applicable to the time of Babel, when there was a spiritual level nearby What does that have to do with reaching Heaven?
Genesis 11:4 writes: 4And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth. Your 'evidence' does not match what the bible says.
Since we don't know precisely what the created kinds were, there is a lot of leeway there. So you have nothing. Don't bring it up if you have no leg to stand on.
But man was a kind, so we did not come from monkeys I thought you said leeway! You seem to have a problem being consistent.
Simple from message 24 writes: I do not believe that Babel was really all that important God found it important. He scattered man and created separate languages just to ruin the project. Thats what the Bible says.
Simple from message 24 writes: God was not pleased that they would try to bypass the promised savior, Jesus, and get there by themselves Link or quote please. I can't find anything to suggest this in the passages. This still does not address the fact (biblically speaking) that God stepped in to ruin a project that was attempting to build a tower to Heaven. Why?
But I think that this happened to fall at a time when something else was happening ANYHOW. Something that the Almighty Himself, said would come down to man in 120 years. So what? Even if this mystery event was about the time of Babel it has no relevance to the importance of Babel.
That means Babel would be, if I have it close here, about the time of Peleg. Let me guess - your guessing. Got any of that evidence you claim to have? Remember this?
No, I am after reality that meets the evidences, that is as simple as possible. Start presenting it then. So far you have produced zero.
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bernerbits Member (Idle past 5973 days) Posts: 73 Joined: |
Simple from message 24 writes: God was not pleased that they would try to bypass the promised savior, Jesus, and get there by themselves Link or quote please. I can't find anything to suggest this in the passages. This still does not address the fact (biblically speaking) that God stepped in to ruin a project that was attempting to build a tower to Heaven. Why? Really this is a product of some kind of attempt to apply logic to "scripture as a whole". God provides Jesus to get us into heaven and must therefore be utterly pissed off by people getting close some other way. This means that heaven must really have been physically located in earth's atmosphere back then before God decided he couldn't outwit the humans that way and relocated (100 years after the flood in simple's chronology -- though that begs the question of where Jesus went when he ascended... if he ascended into space did he asphyxiate and die again?), or God wouldn't have had to ruin the project.
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Vacate Member (Idle past 4629 days) Posts: 565 Joined: |
Really this is a product of some kind of attempt to apply logic to "scripture as a whole" Unimportant. The people of the time didn't read the bible to find out how the plot would unfold. This situation is about the people of the time and Gods reactions. There is no indication that the people of that time knew about future events and did what they did only to make the Bible complete.
God provides Jesus to get us into heaven Us, not them. Jesus came onto the stage sometime later, the 'gonna build a tower to heaven' folk did not have Jesus as an option. Edited by Vacate, : No reason given.
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EighteenDelta Inactive Member |
I think the best model for early language is probably close to modern chimps. Chimps are able to match vocal calls with facial expressions to a fairly high percentage. Communication is less about words and more about emotion in the early stages, which I admit is drifting off topic. The whole idea of the tower of babel and the splitting of language is fairly laughable. Any 'Biblical scholars' care to give us a time frame when this event took place? If god 'confused' the languages of man, to divide them, (why is he so scared of us?) then why are there clear linear progressions from one language to another with predictable results, based on geography, with exceptions like the Basque language. Why are there examples of a number of different languages prior to 4400 BCE (THE FLUD)?
-x
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bluescat48 Member (Idle past 4218 days) Posts: 2347 From: United States Joined: |
One thing that I cannot figure out is why no-one puts himself in the frame of mind of the writer of the particular story. In the Babel case, people assumed that heaven was within reach of building a hight enough tower. It would make no sense to confuse language if it was physically impossible to attain the goal of the tower builders, but if the people, of that time, felt that it was physically possible, then there is a meaning of the babbling.
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simple  Inactive Member |
Only given long ages, and a bunch of other things that you don't have, except in your head.
But that's another topic.
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simple  Inactive Member |
Exactly! The question is was there, then, or not, and how could we now know??? I say let's just believe God, since no one knows.
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simple  Inactive Member |
No, because Jesus was not born in that time right near the flood. There was promised a savior, since the garden. You may have heard that much.
Many times in the bible, it is interpreted by a good many that Jesus was active, such as with the two angels at Sodom, or walking in the garden, etc.This means He was the link to the spiritual, and eternal life we would need to follow, we could not simply climb up to the then present spiritual level of 'heaven' in our still sinful condition!! That is what I mean by trying to bypass the promised savior, and get there by the arm of the still sinful, fallen flesh.
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