Where did language come from?

monika ramzy

Where did all the languages come from? Did humans come up with them, or did God create them when he created us, or did he create them after the tower of Babel? Because non-Christians say it's an evolutionary thing, so i really don't know what or who to believe  ???
hope somebody can help =)

jydeacon

Before the story of Babel there was only one language, after God saw how wicked men had become He said, Let Us go and confuse their language and spread them all over the earth. So thats basically what happened. Lol don't believe evolutionists.

monika ramzy

i know the story of Babel, but did God get all the people to start speaking all these languages that already existed because humans had created it before, or did he create the languages himself? and what about the first language?

for sure i don't believe the evolutionists, but because most people (at least where i live, in Canada) consider evolution to be a fact and assume it's true, i don't know if i can really believe anybody or any books about the origin of language

copticcross3

does anyone know what time the Babel incident was?

Christrules

Correct me if im wrong,

but the evolutionists are not entirely incorrect. The aspect of the starting of multiple languages came from the time that God stopped them from building the tower of Babel. However, God did not create all the languages which exist today. For example he may have created Latin, but many languages, (the romance languages, among many others) derive words from Latin. English has words from German, and is very similar in a lot of things, french and spanish are very similar, why? because they come from one similar language, not because God started spanish and french similar in the babel incident. Language changes as the years go bye (or evolves as some may put it) we add words, words die off, words change, and so forth. Some languages may have evolved from others, but the whole multiple languages thing started with God and the tower of Babel. We cannot however completely discredit the evolutionists idea.

Pray for me

peterfarrington

I am not sure that evolutionary scientists have much to say about the present diversity of languages, that would be more of the study area of linguists.

But as has been said, we can see the development of language right before our eyes as it changes quite quickly in circumstances where there are interactions between different social and ethnic groups, and more slowly within social and ethnic groups.

In England we can see that modern English is different even to the English spoken 100 years ago, and is significantly different to the English of the period when the King James Bible was created. I can just about understand the English of Chaucer in the Medieval period, and cannot understand the English of the Anglo-Saxons.

But modern English is not just a straight line development of English over 1500 years. There was a significant Danish influence - the country was ruled by Danish kings for a while - lots of place names in some parts of the country use Danish words - and other words had a Latin influence - especially religious words, while there was also a French influence through the Normans, and a very few words from the original British language. In more recent times we have words which we have imported from many other languages - khaki, pyjamas, bungalow etc

Father Peter

monika ramzy

so are you saying that God created the first languages at Babel, then the modern languages we know now evolved from those languages?

peterfarrington

I guess I am saying that languages naturally occur from the creation of dialects.

I am not a linguist so I cannot speak scientifically, but the language in the UK, and the USA and most of Canada, is all English, but some speakers of some dialects of English will not be able to understand others. There are people in Scotland I cannot understand, for instance.

English has had a variety of other linguistic inputs over the millenia. The language has developed from an interaction of British, Anglo-Saxon, French, Latin, Danish and even other languages. But Latin can be shown to have a similar development from even more ancient languages.

Indeed my limited knowledge seems to lead me to believe that many linguists believe that there is an Eastern root language that most languages can look back to.

Here is an excerpt from a dictionary..

Middle English, from Old English thrǣd; see terə- in Indo-European roots

or a more complex excerpt..

thread  (n.)

O.E. þræd "fine cord, especially when twisted" (related to þrawan "to twist"), from P.Gmc. *thrædus (cf. M.Du. draet, Du. draad, O.H.G. drat, Ger. Draht, O.N. þraðr), from suffixed form of base *thræ-

We can see here, in this example chosen at random, that a similar word exists in many ancient European language, but is also different in each of these languages. The origin of thread is found in the Sanskrit word for 'a spindle'. Therefore, in ways that linguists can explain, many different peoples have developed similar yet distinct words for this one meaning of 'thread' yet from the same ancient root word.

What I am trying, badly, to suggest is that there is a natural process over time in which languages develop from a small number of roots. Languages have not fallen out of the sky, as it were, and clearly the English language was not created at Babel, if we understand that as an historic event - as I do. But we may believe that the precursors of modern languages were imposed then by God as a punishment. Perhaps Babel is also describing the process by which in ancient pre-historic times as men formed their own societies and set themselves up against others in conflict seeking power for themselves they discovered that their evolving languages were becoming less and less comprehensible to one another.

Part of the nature of the falling away of man from God is an increasing lack of social coherence. And as man loses the ability to speak with God, he also loses the ability to speak with men and to understand and be understood by men. Pentecost is to be understood in one sense as the renewal of the gift of understanding language, so that men hear the common praise of God in their own tongue, and language unites rather than dividing.

Father Peter