† Language is one of the great barriers to human communication. It is as great a barrier as colour and ethnicity, if not greater. Misunderstanding because of linguistic difference could have significant and sometimes tragic consequences. Yet it is God who decided to divide man by languages. Why did God divide man by language? Are there any evidence that there was one language in the world at one time? What was this universal language like?
Why did God need to confuse the languages of man at
In Gen 1:28, God instructed Adam and Eve to
“multiply and fill the earth.” In order to wisely manage all of Earth’s
resources for the benefit of all life, the whole globe needs to be occupied.
But it seems that man failed to carry out this instruction and did not move too
far from the original settlements in
In Gen 9:1, God again instructed Noah and his sons to “multiply and fill the earth.” In Gen 11, we see that God’s command was again ignored for many generations after Noah. Mankind had settled in only one geographical region.
At
[1] To prevent human emigration beyond the boundaries of
[2] To express pride in their own achievements and to make themselves a name: they would achieve something to be envy of by future generations.
The confusion of languages in
[1] God forced man to obey His command to fill the Earth for their own
survival’s sake. This can be deduced from the place names mentioned in Genesis.
In Gen 1—9, the place names mentioned were only in the environs of
[2] God crushed their pride and their wish to gain fame. Philo Judeus
(a Jewish philosopher at the time of Jesus, working in
How did man spread out to inhabit the whole world?
After the confusion of languages, people were inclined to find and stay close to anyone with whom they could communicate. God could have caused each individual to speak a different language. But, apparently, God caused the people from the same tribe or clan or family to speak the same language so that they could converse with each other but not with people from other tribes or families. As a result, nations formed along language lines.
The world was created and formed by God in such a way as to produce land masses and oceans in just the right balance for life. He also fashioned its geography and geophysical forces so that, at just the right time and in just the right places, conditions would foster the separation of the peoples and ensure their staying separated.
Geographers have long noted, with awe and
amazement, that virtually all Earth’s continental land masses lie in climatic
zones suitable for human habitation. Moreover, the continents and major islands
are nearly contiguous so that man could migrate on land for great distances.
However, some water barriers still presented a formidable challenge to people
in ancient times. For example, North and South America are cut off from Eurasia
by the Bering Strait;
The Bering Strait is 80 km wide with a cold
treacherous sea between
How many language families are found in the world today?
There are 7 large language families (each with
more than 200 million speakers, indicated by bold words in the following table)
and 11 smaller regional language families. (The language family at
Linguist Joseph Greenberg proposed 4 language
super-families: African (no.1 to 4 in the table), Eurasiatic (5 to 12),
Indo-Pacific (13 to 15), language of the
|
|
Language
Family |
Location |
People |
Population |
|
1 |
Afro-Asiatic |
Middle East to northern |
Ethiopian, Berber,
Southwest Asian |
339
million |
|
2 |
Niger-Congo
(Niger-Kordofanian) |
central and southeast |
West African, Bantu (Mbuti
Pygmy) |
358
million |
|
3 |
Nilo-Saharan |
central |
Nilosaharan |
35 million |
|
4 |
Khoisan |
southwest |
San/Bushman, Hottentot |
360,000 |
|
5 |
Indo-European |
Latin and Germanic,
including northern |
European, Iranian,
Sardinian, Indian |
2.56
billion |
|
6 |
Caucasian |
|
Chechan, Georgian |
5 million |
|
7 |
Altaic |
central Asia and |
North Turkic (some include
Mongol, Korean, Ainu, Japanese) |
250
million |
|
|
(Chukchi-Kamchatkan) |
|
Chukchi |
23,000 |
|
8 |
Uralic (Uralic-Yukaghir) |
Russian Arctic coast and |
Lapp, Samoyed |
22.6 million |
|
9 |
Dravidian |
southeast |
Southeast Indian |
222
million |
|
10 |
Sino-Tibetan |
|
Chinese, Mongol, Korean,
Japanese, Ainu, Tibetan |
1.28
billion |
|
11 |
Tai-Kadai (Daic) |
|
Thai |
78.4 million |
|
12 |
Austro-Asiatic |
Indo-China |
Mon Khmer, Miao-Yao |
101 million |
|
13 |
Austronesian |
|
Indonesian, Malaysian,
Filipino, Polynesian, Micronesian |
311
million |
|
14 |
Pama-Nyungan (Australian) |
central |
Australian aborigine |
35,000 |
|
15 |
Papuan (Indo-Pacific) |
Papua |
Melanesian, New Guinean |
3.4 million |
|
16 |
American Indian (Amerind) |
northern |
South Amerind, Central
Amerind, |
20 million |
|
17 |
Na-Dene |
|
|
200,000 |
|
18 |
Eskimo-Aleutian
(Eskimo-Aleut) |
Arctic coast of |
Inuit (Eskimo) |
90,000 |
Are all languages in the world originated from a single language?
[1] Man’s linguistic ability: When God created the first human beings—Adam and Eve—He created them in His own image (Genesis 1:26-27). This likeness unquestionably included the ability to engage in intelligible speech via human language. In fact, God spoke to them from the very beginning of their existence as humans (Genesis 1:28-30). Hence, they possessed the ability to understand verbal communication—and to speak themselves.
[2] Origin of languages: Linguists have tried to find out the origin of language, just like scientists try to find out the origin of life. They have invented many different hypotheses but none is supported by the majority of linguists.
o Hypotheses for the origin of language can be classified into 3 groups:
o [1] Imitation hypotheses—human mimicry of naturally occurring sounds or movements: [a] ding-dong hypothesis (sounds of the world), [b] pooh-pooh hypothesis (semi-involuntary cries or exclamations), [c] bow-wow hypothesis (animal sounds), [d] ta-ta hypothesis (hand gestures).
o [2] Necessity hypotheses—human response to acute necessity in the community: [a] uh-oh hypothesis (warnings), [b] yo-he-ho hypothesis (sounds during communal labour), [c] sing-song hypothesis (laughter, courtship, emotional mutterings), hey-you hypothesis (identity, fear, anger), [d] hocus pocus hypothesis (magical or religious sounds), [e] eureka hypothesis (assigning arbitrary sounds to meanings).
o [3] Lying or watch-the-birdie hypothesis—human invention for the purpose of lying or deceiving.
o Christian viewpoint on these hypotheses: We believe that God created the linguistic capacity in man. Since the beginning, Adam and Eve could speak and could understand what God said. No wonder linguists could not definitively support any one of the hypotheses in explaining the origin of language. On the other hand, these hypotheses may be useful in explaining the development of languages through time, that is, how new vocabulary and new usages of existing words develop.
[3] Proto-languages: The
existing state of human language suggests that the variety of dialects and
sub-languages has developed from a relatively few (perhaps less than 20)
languages. These original ‘proto-languages’—from which all others allegedly
have developed—were distinct within themselves, with no previous ancestral
language. Creationist Carl Wieland rightly remarked: ‘The evidence is
wonderfully consistent with the notion that a small number of languages,
separately created at
[4] Linguistic stocks:
Evidence exists in predynastic times in
[5] Linkage between language stocks: Hervas, a Spanish Jesuit, wrote a famous 6-volume Catalogue of Languages, published in 1800. He proved by a comparative list of declensions and conjugations that Hebrew, Chaldee, Syriac, Arabic, Ethiopic, and Amharic are all but dialects of one original language and constitute one family of speech, the Semitic.
o
The idea of deriving Japhetic
languages from Semitic languages has been studied. It was found that
parallelisms exist, not merely for a few possibly borrowed words, but for a
vast number of words which are basic to any vocabulary: numerals, personal
relationships, household objects, things of prime and immediate importance for
individual survival or well-being, and so forth.
o A similar result is found between Hamitic languages and Semitic languages.
o
Therefore, all 3 major language
groups are related.
[6] Monogenesis: It is a hypothesis that there was one single protolanguage (the “Proto-World language”) from which all other languages spoken by humans descend. Is there any evidence that mankind did at any time within the last few thousand years share a single language, as seems to be clearly implied by the wording of Genesis 11:1? The linguists Joseph Greenberg and Merritt Ruhlen advocate such a position. For example, the sound ‘Ma’ seems to universally mean ‘mother’.
[7] One original language: Non-Christian linguistics scholar, Max Muller in his classic work The Science of Language, while denying that any light on the subject could be derived from the biblical story, argue that there was nothing unreasonable in the idea of there having once been a single language shared by all men.
o
His analysis of languages from
all over the world had led him to group them into categories which he terms
respectively the radical, the terminational, and the inflectional.
o
“
[8] Evidence of one original language: Linguists have found connections between quite dissimilar languages, such as the Aryan group, the Semitic group, the Chinese and Polynesian. C.R. Conder [“On the Comparison of Asiatic languages” (1894)] used examples taken from 12 languages: Sumerian, Egyptian, Aryan, Hebrew, Assyrian, Arabic, Turkic, Finnic-Ugric, Mongol, Cantonese (southern dialect of Chinese), Proto-Medic, and Susian. Then 172 root forms were examined in the 8 classes, each root being traced through virtually all the listed dialects or languages in every case. He concluded that all three large families (Semitic, Hamitic, and Indo-European) were probably united as a single language until something occurred to begin their independent development.
o The 8 classes were used for sensations connected with various organs: [1] life or breathing with the nose; [2] light, sight, and fire, with the eye; [3] sound, with the ear; [4] movement, with the leg, [5] swallowing, eating and drinking with the mouth; [6] holding, and striking, with the hand; [7] work, which is not very clearly distinguishable from the preceding class; [8] love and desire.
[9] Linguistics consistent with the Bible: All these results of research in linguistics, including one original language, proto-languages, and linguistic stocks, are consistent with the Biblical record.
What was the original speech of man used by Adam?
Modern Christian scholars generally believe
that the original language used by Adam until
Custance believes that the language of
[1] The names of the immediate descendants of Noah (in Gen 10) were the real names which those people originally bore and are not merely transliterations. They are still traceable, though in modified forms, very extensively among their living descendants who, however, have no recollection of their meanings. Further, these names as given have meanings in Semitic but not in Japhetic or Hamitic languages.
[2] In Genesis 4, which deals specifically with the history of man from Adam to Noah, there are a number of references to persons, places, and events that throw unexpected light upon the subsequent human history even down to the present time. But this light is obtained only if the key words in these references derive their significance from their meaning in Semitic.
[3] If a Semitic form of language was the language of Noah, then presumably it was similar for Adam. The Scripture lends some support to this conclusion because:
o
The word woman is a translation of a Semitic word which is the feminine form
of the word for man. Man is Ish, woman is Ishah. In no other language does it appear to be true that the word
for woman is the feminine form of the word for man. Compare, for example, the
Latin: vir for man, mulier for woman; the Greek. aner for man, gune for woman. In English the word woman is a broken down form of an original “woof-man,” which meant
“the man who weaves.” In Spanish the forms senor
and senora may seem at first
sight to be parallel, but senor is not
really the word for “man” nor senora the
word for “woman.” They are more exactly titles of courtesy like “sir” and
“lady” in English. This exceptional circumstance in the story of Adam and Eve
is in itself some evidence that Semitic was the form of speech which Adam
employed, since it would seem only natural that the first human being should
have named his companion by a modified form of his own name.
† Because of human pride and disobedience, human language was confused. Now, different ethnic groups cannot easily communicate. Yet through the power of God, the process was temporarily reversed at Pentecost in Ac 2:5-13. At the end of the world, the diverse peoples will come together as a single people of God (Rev 7:9).
† Custance quoted the following story to illustrate the universality of the language of heaven: Two believers from different countries met at a conference and observed in one another the unmistakable evidences of their common faith. They approached each other with outstretched hands in welcome and, though quite unable to speak a word of the other’s language, communicated perfectly when the one said, “Alleluia!” and the other replied instantly, “Amen!”