Re: OT: babel and english

> > Like most secular humanist explanations for myth origins, this one is
> > highly unsatisfactory.
>
> I should first off probably clarify that I do not consider myself a
> secular humanist, and therefore it should not be assumed that I give
> full credence to this belief.
And I should come clean and say that I am neither secular nor humanist,
so interpret my own prejucides how you will.

> >  - The dispersal of languages is invariably seen as a bad thing.
> > However, the increasing urbanization of the cities would have been
> > associated with increasing prosperity and greater variety of goods
> > brought in by trade--a good thing. Why would the presence of
> > foreigners bringing goods and wealth to the city be seen as a
> curse?
>
> I think this assumes a great deal about the educational
> sophistication
> that people had of the world around them.
> (snip interesting stuff about ancient and modern xenophobia)
Very good points.  Ancient Mesopotamians probably would have seen the
presence of furriners as a curse rather than a blessing, and so might
have transmuted that bit of history into the myth of sudden appearance of
multiple languages.  However . . .

> >  - The Biblical story, at least, is closely concerned with dispersal.
> > The different language groups break up and spread apart after their
> > languages are split.  There is no trace of that in history--why would
> > urbanization result in breakup of the cities that had become
> > multicultural.
>
> Here what I called the secular humanist's story is less convincing. One
could
> do some hand-waving and say that economic strife could have lead to
political
> strife, and that this political strife led to the depopulation of the
city. These in
> themselves would both be very believeable means to our end.
This actually causes more problems, I think.  Such an event would lead to
the depopulation of one city, or even a handful of cities, but it's
difficult to see how that story could work itself into the myths of an
entire region, and spread as far away as North America (if the Choctaw
story is truly related.)  The diaspora of our hypothetical city might
retain the story, but why would their contemporaries adopt it if no such
event ever occurred in their history?

If a historical antecedent for the Babel story is to be found, I think
that we have to look further back in time than the cosmopolitanization
which occurred around 3500 BC, especially since the Sumerian Babel myth
is probably about that old.  However, going much further back the history
we have is pretty much nil, and we'd be working with guesswork of
prehistory.  As John Cowan said, this is the best we can get working with
the recorded history of the early middle east, but I think that the true
genesis of this myth lies much earlier.

> >  - The 'duh' factor.
>
> Come now -- there's no need to be patronizing to other people.  If
someone
> who has even moderately studied the problem gives their own opinion
about
> what they think is going on, then we should not simply attack them as
ignorant,
> but rather, explain to them what their assumptions are, and then ask
them if those
> seem reasonable.
Sorry I wasn't clearer here--I wasn't saying "duh" to you, but rather
meant to say "duh" to the supposed originators of the myth.  In other
words, "How stupid do you think our ancestors were?"

> In other words, it doesn't matter whether there were
> multiple languages or not before in our theoretical city's history;
what matters is that
> at some point in time, some new foreigners come in, perhaps for
economic reasons,
> and thereafter, their presence is linked in the popular mind with an
influx of other
> languages, and that the social strife that follows is blamed on the
pollution of their
> original ancestral language, which as we all know, can become a
rallying point for
> cultural purists.  Things like that have happened countless times
before;  the only
> historical problem here is that we simply cannot link that kind of
scenario directly
> and explicitly to a known social context.
I still can't buy this.  Such things surely have happened, but I have
trouble believing that "lots of foreigners came" mutated into "everyone's
language was changed."  The actual myths all say that people who formerly
spoke the same language suddenly spoke different ones, not that new
people speaking different languages suddenly appeared.  The fact that
cities were small and the population was mostly rural in ancient
Mesopotamia strengthens this argument.  The cities would not be large,
anonymous groups of strangers, but small communities in which almost
everyone knows almost everyone else, like small towns today in America.
Thus the foreigners would be clearly seen as "not one of us," rather than
"one of us, but speaking a different language."  I find it implausible
that these two would be confused.


Jesse S. Bangs     Pelíran
jaspax @juno.com
"There is enough light for those that desire only to see, and enough
darkness for those of a contrary disposition."  --Blaise Pascal

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