Before Babel: Could the first human language be reconstructed?

[wellwisher]

I used the term verbal and not oral because I was including reading and writing. Just as the sounds to describe something are arbitrary (cat can be called a hundred different sounds) the letter of an alphabet are also arbitrary, since any squiggle can do. The letter "A" is there by convention but has no basis in anything naturally visual. Show me an "A" in nature. Verbal, as defined, is a subjective rendition for the audio and visual of nature.

A visual language is based on sensory reality and is not a subjective rendition. If I watch someone throw a ball, I see things as they occur. This same throwing action will be seen by all humans, the same way, no matter what subjective sounds or set of squiggles they wish to express the observation with. If there were no words and I was watching a person throw a ball, I could place that video in my memory and I could copy it the video and get my body to mimic it.

The problem with this visual language, is it is too fast for most people. Most can't learn easily, by only by seeing but without words. It would be like a professor solving an equation on the black board, without saying anything. Verbal language is useful because it slows down the visual language, so we can break down step by step and then work on each step. This is needed for culture.

It is not uncommon for some uneducated men to become very successful because they will use the visual language. Nobody taught them the words and the steps, but rather they see and internally learn. This is less common for females since although they can learn anything, they need it broken down into words so they can perfect the steps.

Pioneers are most often male, because when you go outside the box or what is known, there are not yet words to describe the steps. Or the words that are available don't stack right or it would be known. You need the visual language to see initial context. Then you put it into words; publish the result so others can see.

Without words, it is not easy to transfer the visual language, which is why verbal needed to evolve. Linguistics may be only involved with the various subjective representations of sounds and visuals created by cultures, and may not be concerned with casual representations that are common to all regardless of culture or time in history.

Body language is based on a visual language. We have also labelled what each visual word of body language means, so we can think in terms of words instead of a purely visual language. This makes people vulnerable to con artists, since a good con artist can use the visual language out of context, since this language is too fast and most will not sense the visual subjectivity, since they think in sounds. This is why it is easy to lie to females, since visual language is not how they think but rather will depend on the words.

 

[Captain Kremmen]

Body language is unconscious, so it can't be a real language.
It does communicate emotion, but it cannot communicate ideas.

 

[Fraggle Rocker]

I used the term verbal and not oral because I was including reading and writing. Just as the sounds to describe something are arbitrary (cat can be called a hundred different sounds) the letter of an alphabet are also arbitrary, since any squiggle can do. The letter "A" is there by convention but has no basis in anything naturally visual. Show me an "A" in nature.

Roman A is Greek alpha, which is a rotated version of Phoenician 'aleph, whose name is the West Semitic word for "ox." The Phoenician letter was a stylization of an older hieroglyph of an ox's head. The apostrophe in 'aleph is the glottal stop, a common phoneme in the old Semitic languages, and the letter was used to phonetically represent this sound. Other letters in the Semitic abjad had similar phonetic evolution from older pictorial hieroglyphs: beth, "house" for B, gimel, "camel" for G, etc. (Those are the Hebrew words, I don't know the earlier West Semitic or Phoenician pronunciations.)

A visual language is based on sensory reality and is not a subjective rendition.

As I pointed out earlier, the word "language" means a set of standardized symbols, i.e., abstractions. Sensory reality is not abstraction, it is what abstractions are abstracted from.

It is not uncommon for some uneducated men to become very successful because they will use the visual language. Nobody taught them the words and the steps, but rather they see and internally learn. This is less common for females since although they can learn anything, they need it broken down into words so they can perfect the steps.

. . . . sexist pig . . . . sexist pig . . . .

A famous passage in one of C.S. Lewis's Perelandra novels described a commune in which everyone took turns doing kitchen work, but men and women never worked in the kitchen on the same night. His explanation is that men require many more words to understand a task, whereas women grasp it intuitively. For example, when washing dishes, one man will say to the other "Put this small green bowl on the second shelf above the long counter, next to the large blue bowl."

When two women are performing the same task, one will say, "Put this over there with the other one."

Pioneers are most often male . . . .

This was true in earlier eras because women were stuck at home nursing babies. In our era, as women have been freed from this bondage (both by child-care technology and by simply having fewer children), an increasing number of pioneers in all disciplines are female.

This makes people vulnerable to con artists, since a good con artist can use the visual language out of context, since this language is too fast and most will not sense the visual subjectivity, since they think in sounds. This is why it is easy to lie to females, since visual language is not how they think but rather will depend on the words.

Con artists say it's just the opposite. It is easier to read women because their facial expressions and body language include more "tells" than ours. But it is harder to lie to them because most of them have raised children and can spot a lie. (Even those who haven't had children of their own have often helped raise their younger siblings, have had jobs as teachers, etc.)

 

[Robert Schunk]

Do you mean we, speaking our modern languages, or we, attempting to speak our academic reconstructions of their languages? Proto-Indo-European has been lovingly crafted by generations of linguists, like the Lego model of the World Trade center in the Smithsonian's National Building Museum. But I'm not sure any of those linguists honestly believe that if they hopped out of their time machine, after a 5000-year trip backwards (having found the right urheimat!), anyone would actually understand them.

I was referring to the reconstructed languages. Obviously, the further back in time you went, the more difficult mutual intelligibility would be.

 

[Fraggle Rocker]

I was referring to the reconstructed languages. Obviously, the further back in time you went, the more difficult mutual intelligibility would be.

That's what I meant. They don't have much faith that their reconstructions are accurate enough to communicate. Hopefully it would seem to be simply a bizarre dialect from a distant outpost, and after a few weeks of work they might be able to understand each other.

 

[Captain Kremmen]

I may be repeating what someone has already said,
but there are many languages which bear no relationship to each other.
Sometimes they are spoken by people who live only a few miles from each other.

If you want to make a new language, you can make any noise to represent any word.
If there is no original written language, which came much later, why should we think there is an original spoken one?

 

[Fraggle Rocker]

I may be repeating what someone has already said, but there are many languages which bear no relationship to each other.

No discernible relation to each other. As noted above, the "5000-year curtain" can easily mask a relationship between two languages that separated very long ago. Vocabulary, grammar, syntax, phonetics, even the attitude toward the universe can turn over completely and leave no traces. The link between Navajo and Yenisei is 8,000 years old and it's so tenuous that it hasn't yet been completely accepted by the linguists' community. Nobody has found any cognates (the same word gone through different phonetic changes), they just have some striking similarities in grammar and syntax.

If, as anthopologists have suggested, the very first language was developed seventy thousand years ago, we have absolutely no hope of tracing the evolution of its daughter languages.

Sometimes they are spoken by people who live only a few miles from each other.

That's often due to migration rather than change in the language. The Finns are generally regarded as "Scandinavians" because they live right next door to the Swedes and Norwegians. But the Scandinavians are Indo-European people whose ancestors migrated up from the Pontic Steppe (or perhaps Anatolia, as some scholars now suggest), whereas the Finns are a Finno-Ugric people related to the Hungarians, and their ancestors migrated from much further east. The languages of the two groups are not related, or at least not obviously.

If there is no original written language . . . .

All phonetic alphabets and abjads (alphabets with no vowels like Hebrew) are in fact descended from the Egyptian writing system. However, non-alphabetic phonetic scripts are not. This includes the abugidas such as those used in India, in which each symbol is a consonant with a diacritic mark representing an attached vowel, and syllabaries such as those used by the Japanese and the Cherokee, in which each symbol represents a consonant-vowel combination. And of course non-phonetic systems like Chinese logograms were also devised independently.

. . . . which came much later, why should we think there is an original spoken one?

If the first language was indeed invented 70KYA, the human population was much smaller (a 5-digit figure) and much more concentrated. Most technologies consist primarily of ideas rather than physical artifacts, so they can spread very quickly, and show up a thousand miles away long before anyone there might have come up with the same idea. Language is one hundred percent ideas, so it can spread even faster. It's not unreasonable to hypothesize that when one tribe invented language, it spread throughout the entire human population (which was confined to Africa) long before anybody else thought of it.

Of course this doesn't mean that's what happened, but it makes it a respectable hypothesis--one which we will almost surely never be able to test.

 

[river]

Was not before Babel , Sumerian the language ?

 

[Fraggle Rocker]

Was not Sumerian the language before Babel?

"Babel" is simply the Hebrew name for the city of Babylon, which was the capital of the empire we now call Babylonia. Many towers were built there, and archeologists and biblical scholars have long struggled to identify one which might have been the source of the mythical "Tower of Babel." One that is frequently cited is Etemenanki, dedicated to the god Marduk, built around 600BCE.

The Babylonian Empire was resilient and existed in various forms for quite a long time. The city of Babylon was originally part of the Akkadian Empire around 2300BCE, when its vernacular language was Akkadian, but Sumerian was used in religious rituals. Babylonia emerged as an independent state around 1900BCE, at which time both Akkadians and Sumerians spoke their native languages.

A relatively minor tribe, the Aramaeans, were eventually conquered and integrated into the empire. For reasons I have never discovered, their language became the lingua franca of the empire, and, eventually, virtually all of Mesopotamia and the surrounding regions. If the legend of the Tower of Babel refers to Etemenanki and is set in the 7th century BCE, the language of Babylon at that time was well established as Aramaic.

Aramaic survived long after the Aramaean people had been swallowed up into the Melting Pot of the Mesopotamian gene pool. It remained the common language for much of the Middle East right up into historical times and even, barely, into the 20th century in the Ottoman Empire. There is still an Aramaic-speaking community with a diaspora that reaches as far as America, and they maintain Aramaic-language websites. Sadly, it is likely that in the 21st century there will be no newborn generation speaking it as their native language, largely because of the wars and ethnic turmoil in Syria and Iraq that are the legacy of the "Cold War" between the USA and the USSR, when we used the Middle East as our chessboard and its people were our pawns. That's where most of the remaining speakers live and they are frantically emigrating to safer countries.

(This chessboard also included Afghanistan, Egypt, Israel, Palestine, Turkey and that entire gigantic, benighted swath of the globe. Americans and Russians have a lot to atone for, but neither of us seems to care.)

Back on topic... Aramaic was the language of Palestine in the time of Jesus. If he was a real historical figure rather than a legend, he would have spoken Aramaic in daily life. Although as a leader of the Jewish community he would have been obliged to be able to recite the Torah in Hebrew, which was otherwise a dead language until its resurrection by the modern state of Israel.

So the language of Babel was probably Aramaic. Nonetheless, like any myth it is difficult to pinpoint in time, so any of the other languages of the region could also be postulated. It's like asking, "What language did the Hobbits speak?"

Many of the languages of the Middle East were and are members of the Semitic branch of the Afroasiatic family, which spans both Asia and Africa. These include Sumerian, Phoenician, Canaanite, Hebrew, Arabic, Aramaic, Maltese and Amharic. This family has five other branches which are found only in Africa: Berber, Chadic, Cushitic, Egyptian (extinct) and Omotic. It's unknown whether the family arose in Africa and was carried to Mesopotamia by immigrants, or vice versa.

However, Akkadian is not related to any known language so its origin (and that of its people) is unclear. Akkadian and Sumerian borrowed liberally from each other due to their proximity. This is an example of a sprachbund, adjacent unrelated languages developing similarities due to sheer proximity, like the thousands of Chinese words in Japanese.

 

[wellwisher]

There are two sides of the brain. Left the brain processes modern differential language. The right brain has it own type of language called symbolism. Symbolism is a spatial language, which is the same for all humans. The right brain is more ancient, while the left brain is more modern. Books like the bible were for the preservation of the right brain language; symbolism. But modern people try to force a left brain fit which does not work very well.

The symbolism of the tower of Babel is about a spatial language (starts out the same for all) changing to a variety of differential languages which become different for all. The symbolism shows a connection to ego-centricity (build tower to heaven). Ego-centric is also processed in the left brain; we subjectively feel unique instead of collective.

This discussion may not be about the original language. Rather is actually about the original left brain language. But this may be barking up the wrong tree. If you look at modern slang, terms and meanings, these can appear spontaneously. If you make use of the creative right brain, the we can generate a new language; Klingon.

Picture it this way. A 3-D symbol of the right brain is like a ball, which has height, width and depth. We can approximate this ball with a large number of circles (2-D), all with a common center, but at different angles. The right brain is the 3-D ball, while the left brain makes use of one or more of the 2-D circles. The common center is that one point, where the 2-D circle completely overlaps the 3-D ball. This combination gives us a differential language via the 2-D circle, plus a gut feeling of spatial language (universal). If you blend these feelings you can mistake a 2-D language as the one and only.

The Tower of Babel is about the time the 3-D language of the right brain creatively starts to generate a variety of 2-D circles within the left brain; left brain languages, to approximate the volume via 2-D. Since each is on center, all will create a gut feeling a unique language is also universal; they all part their ways.

The symbolism of the tower of Babel also has God causing this differentiation. In terms of symbolism, god is the inner self, which is connected to the core regions of the brain. The thalamus is the most wired part of the brain. This highly wired part of the brain (god) downloaded to right brain, then to left brain. via thalamo-cortico-thalamic loops. This processing is 4-D or spatial with a time element. The new languages were not just random but were naturally designed to forward in time.