EvC Forum: Evidence for the Biblical Record

Peg writes:

Zen Monkey claimed that the chinese had no influence from the mesopotamians because the chinese were far far away and already had an established language of their own around the time of the socalled 'babel' account.

Well, almost, but not quite.

Here's what I asked for way back in Message 150:

quote:
How about showing how worldwide language dispersal patterns are clear indications that the story of the Tower of Babel is based on fact?

And then in Message 180:

quote:
You're not proving anything simply by asserting that there are a lot of languages around. What I asked for was evidence showing that the geographic distribution of languages and language families is consistent with a mass dispersal from a central point in the Middle East in historical times. That shouldn't be so hard, should it?

Related languages tend to be neighbors, and languages travel as people travel, becoming more and more different from both their ancestors and their siblings as time goes by. French and Spanish are pretty similar, having both split off from Latin relatively recently and both being spoken in the same part of the world. Latin is also related to Sanskrit, both being from the Indo-European family, but there the relationship is more distant and not as immediately obvious. Nevertheless, it can be demonstrated convincingly that once a single group of people spoke a root language that ultimately split into, among many others, Sanskrit and Latin as the speakers moved off into different directions. By studying the relationships in languages, one can map out the movements of people from one place to another, and can even date how long ago related languages split off from each other. So if the Tower of Babel is true, and it happened only a few thousand years ago, then you should be able to map out the dispersal of all human languages from where that tower once stood.

And your answer to that is to show how people who can't read Chinese, well, can't read Chinese? This whole nonsense about the character for "ship" somehow meaning "eight people in a boat" is utterly beside the point even if it weren't nonsense. I'm asking about linguistic evidence to support the theory that all known human languages originated in the Near East in historical times.

Look at how linguistic evidence works.

Languages change over time. They split off into dialects then eventually develop into new languages. They borrow words and grammatical structures from each other. Words are primary evidence of the settlement, interaction, migration, and dispersal of human cultures. Words are living history.

Linguists are people who have studied languages and their relationships. Even those of us who aren't experts can look at the following and make some pretty basic deductions:

lingua Italian
langue French
lengua Spanish
lingua Portuguese

Could it be that these are related words? Maybe this would also help:

limba Sardinian
limba Romanian
llengua Catalan
lhengua Mirandese

Could this have anything to do with the fact that all of these languages come from countries where Latin once dominated? Is it at all possible that all these words are somehow not only related to each other, but might also all be related to the Latin word linguam? Maybe?

What linguists - that is to say, people who have actually spent decades of their lives studying these things - can do is to use evidence like this to establish relationships among many, many individual languages and language groups. Here's the family tree for Indo-European, the major language family of which English is just one tiny branch.

Remember, linguistics can establish relationships among people both chronologically and geographically. In other words, you can tell who lived where and when. You can even re-create languages for which there are no written records and that have been extinct for millenina.

The above family tree shows relationships that go back thousands of years. And Indo-European is only one of hundreds of distinct language families around the world. Your job was to show how a mass dispersal of all of humanity from a single location in the Near East would result in the patterns of language families around the planet in just a few thousand years. How did all this variety arise in that short amount of time? For example, how did the ancestors of all the people who speak Oto-Manguean languages somehow travel from the Near East , arrive in Central America and then evolve from one root into over 20 distinct languages? (We'll ignore for the moment that the archaeological evidence establishes that the speakers of these languages have been in Central America since at least two thousand years before your proposed date for the Tower of Babel story.) Remember, there are no other languages related to the Oto-Manguean family anywhere else, so the original Oto-Mangueans had to have traveled all that way so rapidly that they didn't interact with anyone else linguistically. Then they had to have evolved all the separate languages in that family just as rapidly. How did this all happen in just 4000 years or so? Where is your evidence that this is what happened?

That's the point of this thread. Not made-up stories about mis-readings of single Chinese characters. Not speculations. What is your evidence?

Edited by ZenMonkey, : Spelling, dammit. And added a map.

I have no time for lies and fantasy, and neither should you. Enjoy or die.
-John Lydon

What's the difference between a conspiracy theorist and a new puppy? The puppy eventually grows up and quits whining.
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