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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.
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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.
From the scholarly rather than faith perspective it is very unlikely tobe 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.
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