When religious people “speak in tongues”, do they claim they’re actually speaking in old archaic languages, or do they acknowledge it’s just a bunch of random syllables thrown together, or what?
There are two kinds: xenoglossia (speaking a foreign language one has never heard before), and glossolalia (speaking a previously unheard language).
The Skeptics Dictionary give an analysis here.
In the interests of balance, I include this link.
from attending a few pentecostal churches, my impression is that speaking in tongues or glossolalia is simply psycobabble. It displays none ofthe complex patterning of real speech, and its speaker does not even know what he is saying (in some churches, another person is then “inspired” to interprete). My girlfriend (then) which is why I was dragged along to these events, said that it must be real because no one could fake it. It was very easy to prove her wrong - even now I can do a convincing glossolalia when called upon.
I should say that everyone in these churches is sincere, it is just so easy to delude onesself
from http://www.religioustolerance.org/tongues1.htm
"“native language of the speaker was a pretty good predictor of the kinds of sounds that would occur in glossolalia; one general pattern was that sounds perceived as generally marking “foreign” speech (whatever that may mean) would occur, while sounds perceived as typical of the native language would not. Thus, for American English speakers, /r/ would be rendered as the alveolar trill, never as the American retroflex; on the other hand, these speakers would not include the low front vowel in their glossolalia, /ae/-as-digraph, because that’s perceived as a typically “American” sound for some reason. On the other hand, truly exotic sounds–those not typical of the native language, but that don’t happen to be familiar to speakers of the language–would tend not to occur: American English speakers don’t produce clicks in their glossolalia.”
In other words, french glossolalia is different than an african or american glossolalia. If it was actually a “message” from above, then there should be some commonality to their utterances
Given humanity’s often twisted and perverted interpretation of many religious text, one has to wonder why the Almighty would make the effort to express Himself/Herself in even less intelligible form.
One of my friends is a born-again, and for a while she had a second friend sucked into it. (Second friend had always been a believer, in a quiet, C of E village churchy way, never a charismatic fundamentalist etc). Anyway both of them got baptised and started speaking in tongues.
The first friend - still a fundy to this day - spoke for the first time in tongues when necking with her boyfriend, now husband. They both recognised what it was, as they had heard similar at their church group. They took it to be the holy spirit intervening in protest against their pre-marital activity. Yeah, whatever. A bolt of lightning would have been a classier way to interrupt, IMO.
The second friend - who I’m fairly certain doesn’t do the tongues thing any more, she’s back to her more moderate faith - started doing it during a religious meeting, IIRC.
Anyway I got them both to do it to me separately over the phone. All I can say is that it sounded similar in both cases, and was considerably more “fluent” sounding than when people just try to spurt gibberish off the cuff. The only word I could discern was “Christe” (pronounced “creestay” a bit like Latin).
At the time I may have been more convinced, however I’m not now. They both had ample time to “learn” the sound of this thing from other fanatics at the group. Having lived in the UAE for a while I could fake Arabic-sounding gibberish just from listening to people here, likewise French-sounding, from my scant knowledge of French.
An elderly cousin of mine, since deceased, was a very devout Plymouth brethren (not an exclusive). He was a very rational man, but highly well-read and knew the Bible backwards. He said his church did not believe in tongues, because it was pointless for God to communicate in a way that no one could understand.
He also said the few times that “tongues” had been interpreted (by one claiming to have such a special gift of interpretation) nothing interesting, particularly unique, or revelatory had ever transpired from the exercise. Just “divine messages” to pray more, etc.
There was a thread on this very topic that contains more information about it; you might want to review that one first.
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=57662.
I don’t know whether this will answwer your question, or maybe you’ve seen it already and it didn’t, but it’s always worth doing a search before posting a question.
Another interpretation of the biblical gift of tongues is facilitated communication between people who do not speak a common language. Either one speaks, through inspiration, in the language of the hearer (“the gift of tongues”) or one speaks in one’s own language and the listeners, again through inspiration, hear their own language spoken (“interpretation of tongues”). The latter seems to be what is described as occurring at the Feast of Pentecost in the book of Acts. The apostles spoke in their language and the hearers all heard the words in their own language.
While this may still strain the credulity of non-believers it does remove the objections to the unnecessarily complex means of delivering the word of God. In this case the purpose is to aid communication, not obscure it.
There seems to be another flavour called ‘praying in tongues’ - where a believer calls out to God in language/sounds that he/she doesn’t intellectually understand.
From a purely secular viewpoint, this may actually have value in that it could be a kind of ‘primal scream’.
I agree. I’ve been to one, and not having my mind occupied by anything else, I tried to analyze the speaking in tongues. It was quite simple and repetitive, and definitely didn’t sound lingual. At best, it was some obscure african language saying “I like ice cream. I like ice cream. I like cake.” or something similar :)… but I was wondering if these people were under the impression that they were actually speaking ancient languages, or what.
Ah, my bad. This is in GD, though, not GQ, and search only works for one forum at a time. And I don’t really search GD for answers to questions like these. Thanks anyway, though.