Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech. Genesis 11:7
"Two phenomena stand out;
first, all these languages appear on the scene at about the same time—the mid-third millennium BC on conventional chronology.
For secular scholars, their origins remain obscure. This is testimony to the sudden diversity and early ethnic movements of these peoples, as we would expect from Genesis 11:8–9.
The main languages and language groups from the Ancient Near East are as follows, and each one is unrelated to any other:
Sumerian: the original language of Lower Mesopotamia. Still only about 75% understood, it involves a noun or verbal base
expressed as a simple syllable or bi-syllable, to which other syllables are added. Its noun can have ten cases, while its verb is highly complex, having an array of prefixed and suffixed particles. A resultant word may express what in English would require a lengthy phrase or even a sentence.
Elamite: spoken in the south-western part of the Iranian Plateau. A ‘proto-Elamite’ script has been identified, while the underlying language is also not well understood.
Egyptian: the language of Pharaonic times was highly complex, and likewise its hieroglyphic script. From this came Coptic, a late form of Egyptian, and the whole Hamitic or Afro-Asian family. Though unrelated to the languages of the Semitic world, many of the latter adopted Egyptian loan words.
Hurrian: the language of the Mitanni kingdom of the mid-second millennium BC. It first appears in cuneiform texts of the late 3rd millennium BC.
Hattian: the earliest language of Anatolia, of which we have only a few short texts. It should not be confused with the later Indo-European Hittite.
Kassite: spoken by the people of unknown origin, but probably from the Zagros Mountains, who overran Babylon in the period following its sacking by the Hittite king Muršilis I (on conventional chronology 1595 BC). This language is only partly understood due to the paucity of texts.
Etruscan: the language of the Italian residents prior to the Romans, who seem to have settled there during the 2nd millennium BC. While the Etruscans adopted the Greek script (originally Phoenician) during the early first millennium BC, the language itself predates this development by many centuries.
Indus Valley language: the script of this very early culture remains undeciphered, and the underlying language remains unknown. Linguist Barry Fells attempted a decipherment in the 1970s, concluding that the script was alphabetic, with six vowels and 24 consonants, while the language, again complex in structure, was clearly Indo-European, in turn a direct ancestor of Sanskrit. While not all have accepted Fells’ decipherment, the Sanskrit connection makes it highly plausible.
The second phenomenon,
These ancient languages of the Near East (and Old Europe) are all long extinct, including the early Indo-European—so much so that several, such as Sumerian, Elamite, Hurrian, Etruscan, Kassite, and Hattian are even now not fully understood, although for the first four we have a fair number of texts.
However, we can observe that some of the vocabulary of these ancient languages passed into later languages, notably Hittite words which passed into Greek and Latin, and from there to the languages of Western Europe, e.g. wātar: water. Akkadian words can be traced in either Latin or Arabic, and via these even into some modern languages, e.g. gammalu: camel; šamaššammu: sesame (literally, “oil of plant”).
Meanwhile, apart from the Semitic, Hamitic, and Japhetic language groups, other distinctive linguistic groups, viz. those of Eastern Europe, Asia, and the Far East, must also have resulted from the Babel event. However, unlike the early languages of the Near East, the early history of these languages is lost in the mists of time. Most of these are still spoken, as follows:
"Two phenomena stand out;
first, all these languages appear on the scene at about the same time—the mid-third millennium BC on conventional chronology.
For secular scholars, their origins remain obscure. This is testimony to the sudden diversity and early ethnic movements of these peoples, as we would expect from Genesis 11:8–9.
The main languages and language groups from the Ancient Near East are as follows, and each one is unrelated to any other:
The second phenomenon,
These ancient languages of the Near East (and Old Europe) are all long extinct, including the early Indo-European—so much so that several, such as Sumerian, Elamite, Hurrian, Etruscan, Kassite, and Hattian are even now not fully understood, although for the first four we have a fair number of texts.
However, we can observe that some of the vocabulary of these ancient languages passed into later languages, notably Hittite words which passed into Greek and Latin, and from there to the languages of Western Europe, e.g. wātar: water. Akkadian words can be traced in either Latin or Arabic, and via these even into some modern languages, e.g. gammalu: camel; šamaššammu: sesame (literally, “oil of plant”).
Meanwhile, apart from the Semitic, Hamitic, and Japhetic language groups, other distinctive linguistic groups, viz. those of Eastern Europe, Asia, and the Far East, must also have resulted from the Babel event. However, unlike the early languages of the Near East, the early history of these languages is lost in the mists of time. Most of these are still spoken, as follows:
- The Slavic languages of Eastern Europe and Russia, which belong to the eastern family of Indo-European languages, along with other closely related Baltic languages of the same family such as Lithuanian and Latvian.
- Uralic Group: this includes Hungarian, Finnish, Estonian, and other languages spoken around the Baltic region, and thence further east. However, they are distinct, and bear no relation to the Slavic languages mentioned above.
- Altaic Group: Turkish, Mongolian, Korean, Japanese.
- Sino-Tibetan Group: Tibetan, Burmese, Old Chinese."
