While I agree that linguists don't generally accept Genesis, it doesn't say that the languages resulting from the Babel confusion were "in any measurable way similar to one another." The fact that people couldn't understand each other suggests just the opposite. So even if there was "a single parent language," there's nothing in the story to indicate that the resulting confusion of languages produced anything resembling said parent language.I'm not so sure that there's nothing to indicate a resemblance. The language was "babbled" or "mixed up" (BLL), which generally means "mixed together", as in mixing flour with oil. The other key word in the story is "scatter" (PWC): the people's original motivation is to avoid scattering, and God responds by doing exactly what they feared. (They thought that "making a name" would prevent it, and this seems to have been exactly the wrong strategy.)
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