Re: OT: babel and english

Aloyen Youngblood wrote:
> My simple thought was that someone with a truly enormous
> building project began taking on skilled and unskilled labor from
> everywhere until it got to the point that the number of languages of
> people in the area working or hoping to work on the project built up
> to unworkable levels.
That would be more likely to result in creolization, I would think.

But, I wonder about something.  We know that the rate of linguistic
change is not constant.  Could it be that there are occasions when over
the period of a few generations, dramatic linguistic change can occur,
such that nearby cities that had once spoken similar dialects now spoke
distinct languages?  That could explain the linguistic explosion
component of the story.  I'm not sure where the tower component came
from, but maybe that was added later to explain why that explosion had
occurred.

Of course, the story could also easily just be pure fiction.

--
Cenedl heb iaith, cenedl heb galon
A nation without a language is a nation without a heart - Welsh proverb
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