Babel is a Hebrew word meaning ‘confusion’. It gives us the English word ‘babble‘. An unintelligible and inarticulate sound. That’s what foreign languages sound like, isn’t it? Even if we can appreciate the beauty of Italian opera or Bantu antiphony, it’s hard to know where one word ends and the next begins. But no language is just babble. All of them can express the full depth of human feeling. But in very different ways.
Babble, Babel. Confusion. According to the Biblical story, the builders of the eponymous tower, previously of “one language, and of one speech,” were suddenly and inexplicably unable to communicate with one another. Babble.
Was there then just one original language? Have all languages developed from one common source?
Most people no longer believe the story of the Tower of Babel to be literal truth. They presume that science has probably found another, more learned, answer to the mystery of the origin of language.
And many different theories have indeed been put forward. As the theory of biological evolution became generally accepted, it was at first proposed that language must have developed from primitive grunts and gradually evolved into complex speech. According to this theory, older languages would be expected to be grammatically unsophisticated, whereas more modern ones would be capable of more complex thought.
Unfortunately for the proponents of this theory, the evidence did not back it up. Even the most cursory glance at ancient tongues such as Sanskrit or Iroquois shows the numerous holes in this hypothesis. In fact, problematically for some, it would seem that the further back we go, the more complex language is. Nineteenth-century language scholars had imagined for example that African languages would be no more than primaeval sounds, but they were astounded to see a symmetry so beautiful that it rivals the periodic table of the elements. No-one can really explain why.
Animals communicate, of course, but it has been discovered that there is an enormous – and still baffling – chasm between the sounds that they make and human language.
And the phonemes of human speech are not simply arranged slightly differently in different languages to express meaning; they are combined in ways that express completely different ways of thinking.
So we are back to Babel. Babble. Confusion. We simply cannot find a common ancestor of all the languages of the world, no matter how far back we go.
This is an extract from The Language Secret: How to Learn a Foreign Language: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09HFSN7Y5
