Re: OT: babel and english

Marcus Smith wrote:
Why did the mound of stones get knocked down three
>times before languages became confused? The motivation for building the
>mound in the Choctaw story is curiosity about the nature of the sky and
>clouds, not a desire to reach Heaven.
Interesting.  Weren't the Choctaw one of the mound-building tribes?  I seem
to recall that that is believed to derive from Aztec influence; and the
Aztecs probably got it from the Maya, early astronomers par
excellence....???  A very distant, distorted idea of what mounds were for in
the first place???

>The Choctaw story is a myth about the tribe's origin as well as why there
>are other tribes and languages.
Surely early people were not isolated, and would have been well aware that
the folks in the next valley or across the bay etc. spoke differently.  Even
the ancient Hebrews were aware of dialectal differences-- the "shibboleth"
story.  Given the millenia that are required for languages to differentiate
(radically), it would be fairly well impossible to have any surviving memory
of "unity" (read: proto-language), and Babel stories are simply attempts to
explain existing diversity, on the order of "how the leopard got his spots"
.

Incidentally, there is a large group of closely related ("Toraja") languages
in central Sulawesi (Indonesia)-- they distinguish them according to the
word for "no".

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