Re: OT: babel and english

Jesse Bangs wrote:

> > > So perhaps there was a time when all
> > > tribes were in harmony, and maybe even spoke the same
> > > language, and then split and were wrenched into war.
> >
> > The usual secular humanist's explanation of the Babel story is that
> > at one period early in the history of Mesopotamia, the economy
> > of the citystates had developed to such an extent that it was
> > spurring the growth of international trading networks, leading as far away as
> > Elam and even the Indus Valley.  Thus, for the natives, it might
> > seem that within one generation, without realizing it, they were becoming
> > more cosmopolitan, or rather, were inventing cosmopolitanism, and
> > with that, more multicultural and multilingual.  Since we know from
> > archaeological finds that these trading networks were a reality, it is not an
> > unreasonable historical scenario.
>
> 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.

> I'm not sure how many near eastern mythologies
> include a Babel story, but I know that the Sumerian myths also contain
> one, and it has many features in common with the Hebrew story.  Just
> looking at those features that jump out from memory as common to both and
> so probably common to the proto-myth, I see several problems:
>
>  - 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.  The case of free-trade
in our world is a similar phenomenon:  trade tariffs and restrictions artificially
raise the equilibrium price level that goods will sell at, and usually harm most
the people they are so often invoked to protect:  the poor.  The poor are the
people who are most vulnerable to the kinds of relatively small changes in
price levels that changes in trade restrictions bring, while the rich qua their
wealth are much better equipped to weather these kinds of changes. So,
free trade makes the poor absolutely richer assuming that the value of the
currency remains the same.  Yet quite a few people, rich and poor, resist
free trade -- why? I would say it is because of ignorance about the way the
economy works, and often because of putting selfinterest ahead of societal
interests, i.e. protectionism. In certain countries, e.g. France, it is often alleged
that foreign trade in some industries, like movies and foods, pollutes their culture,
and so cultural purity becomes a pretense for protectionism.

Another reason aside from the above cited could be simple prejudice:
why do some people in Germany dislike the presence of Ausländer
(foreigners) and Gastarbeiter (guest workers) so much? These foreigners
bring great benefits to German society through their labor, their skills
and their worldviews (Weltanschauungen, as the Germans would call it).
In America, certainly, it is known that the one million or so additional
immigrants every year add at least 10 extra billion dollars to the national
wealth through keeping wage inflation in check and through setting up
manifold new businesses. And in countries like Germany, where the rate
of natural increase is now negative, immigrants are necessary just to keep
the current level of social funding programs afloat.  So immigrants are
a positive good in many places and in many respects, and yet there is,
especially in parts of the world that have not been built by immigration,
like Europe, Russia, etc a certain resistence to immigrants, again, often under
the pretense that their culture will be "polluted".  In as advanced a country
as France, there is actually a serious and fairly raging debate over whether
Muslim female children have the right to wear head-shawls in schools!
Imagine that! The claim is that they are not acting "French" enough when
they wear these shawls, even though they read Moliere and Voltaire with
as much interest as their Gallic neighbors*. (This is also the same country where
several years ago I seem to remember one politician's presidential ambitions
were scuttled because he was a "foreigner" -- even though his Jewish ancestors
had settled in France 500 years ago!). And although it would be harder to
imagine this debate about clothing happening in societies founded on immigration,
like the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, this shows that prejudice can
happen even in the most advanced societies;  these other countries certainly
have plenty of problems of their own with human prejudice (US racial profiling,
the One Nation party in Australia, etc.)

*(I am not giving up on my cynecism here:  I believe most French people
read and enjoy the French classics far less frequently than they would like to
think they do.)

Now take a step back, and remove the assumption that we are talking about
a modern industrial economy, where movement of people and goods and
services from one continent to another  is a daily fact of life, and which have
vast bureacracies specifically designed to make its constituents knowledgeable
about the world around them.  Move to one, like Ancient Mesopotamia, where
the vast majority of the population has never moved tens of miles away from
the place of their birth, and where well over 90% of the population lives in rural
areas. It is easy for me to imagine that with both a lack of education about the way
the economy works and a good dose of the bigotry and narrowmindedness
that naturally arises in mankind, the presence of foreigners would cause
social strife and conflict due to competition over jobs.

>  - 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. We know that
plenty of conflicts have been primarily economic conflicts over resources, and
we also know that virtually all the cities of the Ancient Mesopotamia have been
sacked and depopulated many multiple times.  The only problem with this theory
is that (as far as I know) there is no direct evidence to link a particular instance
of economic strife with political strife, and also know how the linguistic situation
was affected.  On the other hand, our knowledge of even relatively recent antiquity
(e.g. the period of the late Roman Republic) is shot so full of holes that anyone who
reads the bickering between scholars of the subject could easily come to the
conclusion that nobody really has a consistent idea about what was really going on.
This problem is even more acute when scholars argue about political strife in remote
antiquity, because so much of our knowledge of that time period is from... well, pot
sherds and wrought-stone cylidrical royal seals and such. We often just barely have
an idea of who was king at what time, and know virtually nothing about the events
of his reign, and more often, know neither of these things.  The point of all this is
that most of what you say about remote antiquity is going to be disputed by someone
who has a different interpretation of the same set of physical remains, and those
physical remains are typically tiny in number.

>  - 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.  If they don't agree with us, that's their problem, not ours (and
in most scholarly studies, the scholars' work will not have grave political
ramifications like, say, the holocaust revisionists' would).

> Even before multilingualism within the city-states,
> the city-states would have been very familiar with the differing
> languages of the people around them, and would only have seen the
> presence of foreign languages as an increase of an old phenomenon, and
> not something entirely new.
It is true that most cultures today and, presumably, always have existed
in a multilingual context.  The point of my original post (it was unclear, I guess)
is that cosmopolitanism naturally gives rise to certain social ills that are not
present in less multicultural communities.  The very existence of multiple cultures
gives human beings an excuse to create artificial differences between each other,
such as racism, sexism, ageism, anti-Semitism, etc.  It is IMHO naive
to suggest that humans do not naturally take advantage of such differences when it
is in their interest to do so. 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.

It was in this sense that I said the secular humanist's theory is not unreasonable.

===================================
Thomas Wier | AIM: trwier

"Aspidi men Saiôn tis agalletai, hên para thamnôi
  entos amômêton kallipon ouk ethelôn;
autos d' exephugon thanatou telos: aspis ekeinê
  erretô; exautês ktêsomai ou kakiô" - Arkhilokhos

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