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  • From: Peter Kirk <peterkirk AT qaya.org>
  • To: "Read, James C" <K0434995 AT kingston.ac.uk>
  • Cc: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Language Evolution
  • Date: Wed, 21 Sep 2005 13:37:10 +0100

On 21/09/2005 08:49, Read, James C wrote:

...

Anyway, on with the linguistics! These factors seem to suggest that the idea of a community centered around a citadel with a common language as presented in the account of the tower of Babel seems reasonable from both a faith perspective and from a historical perspective. The bible tells us that Yah himself confused the languages (I believe this to be true). The historians may prefer to believe that the growing populace evolved new languages as they were now more spread out with no unifying linguistic standard.


James, I don't want to belittle your faith position, but the scholarly evidence (not so much historical as geological and genetic, with some archaeology as well) now seems to point in a rather different direction. There is a consensus based on good genetic evidence that modern humans first lived in Africa, and that all non-Africans (ignoring racial mixing in the last few millennia) descend from a small group which left Africa around 80,000 years ago. So your hypothesised flood and probably your single world language would have to be relocated to Africa and pushed back to something like 100,000 years ago.

An alternative which has been suggested is that the flood stories found worldwide relate to a catastrophic flooding at the end of the last Ice Age. The sea level is now thought to have risen by as much as 100 metres between 14,000 years and 7,000 years ago - although it has been fairly stable since then. The rise would generally have been gradual, but there may have been catastrophic sudden rises accompanied by huge tsunamis at certain times e.g. when major ice sheets collapsed. The last such major event was the collapse of the Laurentide ice sheet into what is now Hudson Bay, about 8,000 years ago; some geologists have suggested a very rapid 25 metre rise in sea level to not far below the modern level, followed by a graudal fall of perhaps 6 metres and then another more gradual rise. (The exact levels vary from place to place because of local geological changes.)

In an era when humans probably almost all lived near the coast, such events would have been truly catastrophic for all inhabited areas. In the Middle East, the area in question for the Hebrew flood story, the Persian Gulf would probably have been largely dry before this event, but would have filled rapidly and catastrophically, flooding and drowning a huge area. The biblical and other Middle Eastern flood stories may well relate to this event - which may correspond archaeologically with the start of the 'Ubaid period around 5500 BCE. After this flood Babylon, which was not far above the highest flood level, may have become a centre of resettlement, until that society disintegrated leading to language diversification.

It is interesting that a lot of attention has been given recently to the flooding of the Black Sea as a possible candidate for the biblical flood, but not so much to the flooding of the Gulf which happened not long before, and may have been even more sudden and catastrophic.

...
It is therefore not unreasonable to assume that, for whatever reason, the major linguistic families had there beginnings in some common place (e.g. babel and its surroundings) and that through migration these languages spread into the world in their different directions, african languages moving south, Chinese/Japanes family moving East (way East!), Latin/Greek moving west, Norse moving North-West, Syrillic moving North-East and the Semitic languages continuing to dominate the ANE.
Therefore, what we loosely refer to as 'proto-semitic' must be the original Semitic language that existed in Babel before the mass migrations started.


James, I am surprised that you are not better informed about the details here. This kind of picture is very probably true of Semitic languages and perhaps the wider Afro-Asiatic group (spoken only in northern parts of Africa and the Middle East), and perhaps of other Eurasian languages.
From the scholarly rather than faith perspective it is very unlikely to
be true of southern African, Australian and American languages. Australia and America were essentially cut off from Eurasia until modern times by the rising sea levels after the Ice Age, and southern Africa, also fairly well cut off by deserts, would have almost certainly retained its original languages. The Austronesian languages of SE Asia may well have a similar separate history, but that is a different matter.

For much of this I am dependent on the popular works of Stephen Oppenheimer, "Out of Eden" and "Eden in the East". Although some of his material is speculative, other parts including the sea level data seem to be based on sound scientific evidence.

--
Peter Kirk
peter AT qaya.org (personal)
peterkirk AT qaya.org (work)
http://www.qaya.org/



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