Just as trivia, recent discoveries in the eastern Egyptian desert push Egyptian writing back a bit beyond Sumerian (although the writers seem to be using, if memory serves, another language).
By the way, jab1, thanks for the links. Good stuff.
Well, there are some obvious problems with this explanation. As has already been pointed out, Sumerian, Chinese, and Egyptian written languages all predated 1800 BCE. Sumerian and Egyptian were both combined ideographic and phonetic schemes, so your explanation is shot down right there- if nothing else, we would have seen a change in the spellings of words in 1800BCE. More problematically, Sumerian, Egyptian, and Chinese are completely different kinds of languages:
Egyptian: A semitic language like Hebrew, in which the basic meaning of a word is carried by its consonants.
Sumerian: An agglutinative language like Tibetan or Turkish, in which the meaning of a word is changed by adding suffixes-sometimes as many as 5-10 per word, IIRC.
Chinese: An isolative language, in which suffixes and prefixes do not exist. Since Japanese has suffixes, using the Chinese alphabet as is as a writing system for the Japanese language leaves a lot to be desired, so the Japanese also have syllabaries which are used to tack suffixes onto the ideograms.
So you see, you can’t just argue that the Chinese, Sumerians, and Egyptians all had the same spoken language before Babel. You can’t write Sumerian using Chinese ideograms, and if you were to write Chinese using Sumerian cuneiform, you wouldn’t have all these suffixes.
And a final point: different words divide up the world differently. The Greeks had a single word for leg and foot, and considered the future to be behind them, sneaking up on them- modern Americans consider the future to be ahead of them, with us charging boldly ahead. The ancient Egyptians had odd ideas about prepositions. I don’t remember any specifics, but basically they had a single word for things like “from”, “in front of,” and “out of.” These differences wouldn’t exist if they all had the same spoken language.
Heck, for that matter, if they all had the same spoken language, then all these written languages would have the same word order.
No doubt the Talmud has a perfectly reasonable explanation for all of this.
-Ben
LazarusLong42,
O.K., but you’re talking about Proto-World, which is even more of a stretch than Nostratic. Nostratic would have to have originated something like 15,000 years ago, while Proto-World would be something like 40,000 years ago.
I’m only arguing that Nostratic is not a nut theory, not that it’s generally accepted. One person I spoke to several weeks ago who is knowledgeable in linguistics (actually he teaches Gaelic), told me that things look better if you look just at Euroasiatic (just Indo-European, Altaic, and Uralic), rather than at the other families included in Nostratic (Afro-Asiatic, Kartvelian, and Dravidian).
I note that there’s a short discussion of the Nostratic hypothesis in The Atlas of Languages, edited by Bernard Comrie, Stephen Matthews, and Maria Polinsky, which doesn’t include any mere nut theories.
In any case, all I was saying in my first post was that there are some linguists who believe in Nostratic, not that there’s anything like a general agreement on it. In any case, I don’t know enough about the issue to have an opinion on it myself.
And returning to the OP, even Proto-Indo-European would be before the postulated date of the Tower of Babel.
Is this what you were referring to: “Earliest Egyptian Glyphs” from Archaeology Magazine. And here’s a quote that goes against pretty much all the young-Earth creationists’ claims:
Young-Earthers claim the Earth is only 6000 years old.
Or it may be this story: “First Alphabet Found in Egypt.”
The alphabet used had not yet been deciphered at the time this article was published last January.
The unique form of the Egyptian writing allows archaeologists to date the unfamiliar alphabet. The Egyptian water sign, usually horizontal, is vertical. Only during the early Middle Kingdom (the mid-22nd century BC) did the Egyptians use a vertical water sign. (Did it refer to rain? I don’t know.)
In the 1800s BC, Sumerians were conscripted into the Egyptian army. Among their duties was road upkeep, and the inscription was found alongside an ancient road (but in the western desert, not eastern). Perhaps the inscriptions were made by a bored road crew. Maybe it’s the equivalent of “Kilroy was here.” 
BTW, if the Tower of Babel was built in 1800 BC, how could there be Egyptians more than 300 years earlier?
Anyway, I hope this is what you were referring to, Collounsbury.
pantom:
Here’s the quote from you that gave me that impression:
Considering that this Indo-European is generally considered the base language from which today’s languages derive, you appeared to be saying that the fact that it predates the Tower of Babel indicates a flaw in that story…as if no language existed prior to then.
Thanks for your concern, but if you check out the little “member notes” on the side of the posts in the thread, you’ll notice I’ve been posting here for a good long while, and I’m quite familiar with “this audience.” Most of “this audience” knows I’m a religious Jew who believes in what you’ve denounced as “hooey.” Flymaster, in his original post, specifically asked about language evolution from the standpoint of Biblical believers, and therefore I answered him as such. Clearly, those who do not believe in the Bible need not take my word as objective, but they should realize that the original post was asking for answers from a specific perspective.
Ben:
Well, as I believe I admitted, my knowledge of ancient languages is indeed deficient, and I appreciate your and others’ efforts in filling in some of that gap.
What it ends up boiling down to is the same question that always comes up about not only the Tower of Babel, but also about the Flood of Noah and creation in general, which seems to be at odds with currently-recognized archaeological dating. While science is nice, it is always subject to revision, and trusting one side to believe over another, well, that’s what faith is all about…irrational though it sometimes seems.
Chaim Mattis Keller
Lurking I was startled by this statement
Ah, eh… I hope I am misunderstanding you but you seem to think Indo-European is the mother tongue of the world? Proto-Indo European was never a real langauge, its a linguistic construct describing what was likely to have been the mother dialect cluster for the Indo-European language family. This says nothing about other language families, such as Afro-Asiatic, Niger-Congo etc. etc. etc.
I hope you are saying that you think this is a good thing. I can appreciate the appeal of believing in something that never changes, because it gives one that warm, secure feeling most of us crave. But the reality is that things are ALWAYS changing. If science is always being revised, well, it’s because it’s trying to keep up with reality.
Faith in something for which there is physical evidence is not necessarily irrational. I have faith that the sun will “rise” tomorrow because it did so today and I know only a major catastrophe could prevent it from happening. There is a chance that the Sun will go supernova before tomorrow or that the Earth could be destroyed by an enormous asteroid before dawn, but the chances of these things happening are vanishingly small. So it doesn’t worry me.
Faith in something for which there is no physical evidence but a book…?
> Many historical linguists do think that they can reconstruct a proto-language that Indo-European came from.
Wow, what cunning linguists they must be.
Also, we’re not talking about faith in something which is arguably beyond or not in the realm of empirical investigation, like justice or love or even the existence in the abstract of a Creator, but faith in historical claims which can be evaluated on the basis of available evidence, and which haven’t stood up to that evaluation. It’s like having faith that the Sun won’t appear to rise tomorrow due to the rotation of the Earth on its axis; or maybe that it will rise tomorrow in the west (and that it’s always risen in the west–everybody who claims otherwise is just misremembering what happened yesterday, or maybe lying to promote their godless secular humanistic lifestyle). Of course the denial of reality isn’t that blatant, but that’s the class of claims we’re talking about with Biblical literalism (young-earth creationism, the Tower of Babel, Noah’s Ark and a totally global flood, and so on).
cmkeller
If you refer to my first post in this thread, you would have seen that there would have been no way to infer that I was referring to the beginning of all human communication:
Subsequent discussions about Nostratic were based on whether or not some relationship could be established between IE and other language families.
The hooey involved (as you well know) has nothing to do with bashing Biblical religion, and everything to do with this literalism that keeps getting promoted. When it starts taking over the Boards of Education of entire states, well, I and a lot of other people interested in progress - especially those of us with children in public schools - start to sit up, take notice, and do a little screaming.
Collunsbury & Pantom:
Okay, I see my error in my interpretation of that “Indo-European” bit. Sorry; it seemed to me that what I’d heard in the past considered this “proto-language” was actually the very first human language.
Nonetheless, I do think that the Tower of Babel story does not contradict the possibility of some natural branching of languages prior to the flood. The Biblical comment that prior to the Tower of Babel event everyone spoke the same language seems, to me, to refer specifically to immediately (within one or two generations) after the flood, at which time all of the survivors were members of the same family. So the existence of divergent languages prior to the flood is not necessarily at odds with that Biblical story.
Jab1:
Oh, I wasn’t meaning it to be a criticism of science in general. However, when it comes to the science of detecting the past, which necessarily involves quite a bit of speculation, I consider this a point against throwing out millenia-old traditions because science currently states contrary to it. The fact remains that much historical skepticism has been proven unjustified within the last century. Skeptics doubted the very existence of Troy, and then they had to eat their words when it was discovered by Schliemann (sp?). Biblical skeptics had their doubts about the existence of an actual King David, but his name turned up on a recently-unearthed artifact. Given the choice between ancient written tradition and modern speculation, I think I’ll lean toward the tradition…within certain boundaries, of course.
Funny, I thought documents were considered physical evidence. Especially when the chain of transmission can be traced very far back.
pantom:
Well, I certainly think it’s not appropriate to be part of a public school curriculum, but bashing the book (i.e., calling it “hooey”) is still bashing its believers. But I’ll let it pass if you’ll keep the insults out of your statements of opinion.
Chaim Mattis Keller
cmkeller writes:
> Sorry; it seemed to me that what I’d heard in the past
> considered this “proto-language” was actually the very
> first human language.
Then it seems to me that you don’t know very much about linguistics and in particular about historical linguisics. May I make a polite suggestion? Please go to a library and check out a basic text about linguistics and another basic text about historical linguistics. If you want suggestions, you might go to a nearby university with a linguistics department and ask them what the basic textbooks for linguistics and historical linguistics are. I’m sorry I have to be rude about this, but if you think that Proto-Indo-European (a language that we can fairly accurately reconstruct which was spoken about 6000 years ago and which is only the ancestor to a couple hundred of the 6000 or so modern languages) was the “very first human language” (which would have to have been at least 40,000 years ago to have produced the present state of the world’s languages), then you need to learn much more about linguistics. I’m not asking you to accept all the results of linguistics, of course, but you at least need to understand those results if you want to criticize them.