How is Babel across non-Hebrew cultures?

First a little question some may consider unrelated. Can computer translation overcome the obstacle posed since Babel?

No.

The Atlantic : The Shallowness of Google Translate
Douglas Hofstadter | January 30, 2018
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/01/the-shallowness-of-google-translate/551570/

I'll cite for brevity the translation examples between French and English, for full story read the article, please!

Here is a sentence in English:

In their house, everything comes in pairs. There’s his car and her car, his towels and her towels, and his library and hers.

Here is the Google translate version:

Dans leur maison, tout vient en paires. Il y a sa voiture et sa voiture, ses serviettes et ses serviettes, sa bibliothèque et les siennes.

Here is the human translation:

Chez eux, ils ont tout en double. Il y a sa voiture à elle et sa voiture à lui, ses serviettes à elle et ses serviettes à lui, sa bibliothèque à elle et sa bibliothèque à lui.

Here is the Google translate version of that:

At home, they have everything in double. There is his own car and his own car, his own towels and his own towels, his own library and his own library.

In other words, Google translate is not capable of understanding information. Now there is one claim by the author I disagree with:

Let me hasten to say that a computer program certainly could, in principle, know what language is for, and could have ideas and memories and experiences, and could put them to use, but that’s not what Google Translate was designed to do. Such an ambition wasn’t even on its designers’ radar screens.

I don't think a computer could that. I think Douglas Hofstadter is unduly caving in to a logical consequence of materialism, which Google Translate is very apt to disappoint you on.

If we are basically only rearranged matter and yet we think, rearranged matter would at some point be able to think. Well, we aren't and it won't.

Google Translate isn’t familiar with such situations. Google Translate isn’t familiar with situations, period. It’s familiar solely with strings composed of words composed of letters.

Google translate is not familiar with strings composed of words composed of letters any more than a calculator is familiar with numbers and operations anymore than an abacus is familiar with adding and subtracting of numbers expressable as fives and units in couples for each either unitary digit or multiple of ten thereof. These things are what the machines in each case are used for, but only the users, not the machines, are in actual fact familiar with them.

Now, let's shift subject a bit and use Google translate for Chinese, Malay, Arabic and Japanese for me, thou, we, ye.

With Chinese I think the translation is correct, since ma and me once dreamt of Learning Chinese and "wo" and "ni" and plural ending "men" for either sticks out from my memories of the book. With the other three languages, the translation for "thou" and for "ye" is identical, making me think that maybe Malay and Japanese don't distinguish singular from plural you, but maybe rather it was Google Translate that wasn't programmed to make this translation.

The reason I used object form "me" instead of subject form "I" is, on a previous occasion, I had gotten "yishi" for "I" and I suspect Google Translate had taken "I" for the Roman numeral for "one", not for subjective form of "me". Anyway, I later saw sth hinting that "yishi" could be "one" and I thought I remembered "wo" - which seems to be correct from below. For Arabic I am nearly sure that different pronouns exist for singular and plural. This is why I marked the forms under "ye" with ? except for Chinese "nimen".

	me	thou	we	ye
Chinese	Wǒ	nǐ	wǒmen	nǐmen
Malay	saya	kamu	kita	kamu ?
Arabic	'ana	'ant	nahnu	'ant ?
Japanese	Watashi	anata	watashitachi	anata ?

Note, between these pronoun systems, should they be spoken in the same area (which is a known case for Chinese, Malay and one more language, forgot which one), there is no "conflict of interpretation".

No pronoun in one of these languages means the opposite in another of them.

There are at least two situations in which speakers of one language could borrow pronouns from another one : conflict of interpretation and the borrowing language being weak. Like Gaelic in an area where all the young speak English only.

Now, what do I mean by conflict of interpretation?

Suppose we allow language A and B to replace Chinese and the rest. Suppose we fill in with X, Y, Z and so on. And we'll even skip the plural.

	me	thou
A	X	Y
B	Y	Z

A word Y would mean "me" in one language and "thou" in the other. In a widely bilingual situation with rapid codeshifting this would lead to confusion.

I think both languages would be likely to compromise on a pronoun system like:

	me	thou
A & B	X	Z

Those who know my earlier work would know that this is how I think Indo-European pronouns and Finnish conjugation ended up with very similar forms. In other words, similarity of pronouns would not be a foolproof actual proof of a common ancestor. Those who disagree would typically consider Indo-European languages had a common ancestor with each other c. 4000 BC, and with Finno-Ugrian perhaps 10 000 BC.

If you allow humanity to have existed 100 000 years, perhaps all languages are ultimately related, that's Merrit Ruhlen's vision. An English Dictionary, forget if it was Oxford or Webster, offered 500 roots in the Proto-Indo-European stage and Ruhlen offers 32 from the Proto-Human one.

Obviously, on the Biblical timeline, there is no time for Khoisan and Aleutic to have a common ancestor.

On the Biblical timeline we also have another event, the split up of languages at God's judgement over Babel. If Babel was 2556 BC and earliest attested Indo-European languages are Hittite and Mycenaean Greek, and if we reduce earliest attestation of Hittite from 16th to 15th C. BC, by my carbon calibration, and similarily earliest documentation of Linear B, in which Mycenaean Greek is written, from 15th to 14th C. we have a bit more than 1000 years for "branches of Indo-European" (as they are called) to coalesce around certain common traits, including pronouns system, so my scenario is feasible.

But some would like extra-Biblical (including external to comments on the Bible, so it should be neither Jewish nor Christian nor Samarian to be truly extra-Biblical) confirmation for Babel, like we have plenty for the Flood.

Now we come at last to what I am offering to talk about.

No, outside Hebrew culture, we basically don't have that.

Egyptians presume Egyptian was the original language. If, as Herodotus reports, an Egyptian king named Psammetikos raised two children without language contact to find out if that was so, Wahibre Psamtik I was of the 26th Dynasty.

To earlier Egyptians, I presume, non-Egyptians spoke non-Egyptian languages as created by the chaos god (nearly devil) Seth.

Babylonian residents seem to have been intrigued by the practical diversity between Sumerian and Akkadian and other languages, but not to the point of either preserving Babel story or making up an alternative to accounty for this diversity in theory.

Greek version of table of nations has Hellen as son of Deucalion and Pyrrha - the Flood survivors, then his grandson Aegimius is speaking to Hercules, who himself descends from Perseus who was tenth generation after Inachus, who would seem to have been after the Flood. Either a chronological mix-up or Hellen, Dorus, Aegimius lived really long. But between Inachus and Perseus, you have the two brothers Danaus and Aegyptus. And no explanation is offered why Danaans speak Greek or why Aegyptians speak Egyptian.

In the Iliad, some place names in the Troad have double names : the Greek one is "in the speech of gods" while the Trojan name is "in the speech of men".

Similarily, for Hindoos, Sanskrit is the holy language uniting gods and men, and other languages are simply - debased Sanskrit. Hindoo speakers of Tamil want Dravidian to be related to Sanskrit.

Everyone is taking for granted the own language was before the others - which Hebrews do also, even if Genesis 11:1 doesn't spell this out, all cannot be right, but one might be - but offering no real explanation for the existence of other languages.

Hebrews (Christians and Jews alike) have a very different explanation, in the first part of Genesis 11.

It is so unique, even Muslims don't have it in the Quran, and they might differ on whether they accept it or not. The Quran as such only says Allah created different people with different languages - not specifying if this means in parallel with Adam and Eve or not.

Here** is a more full discussion:

Although not mentioned by name, the Quran has a story with similarities to the biblical story of the Tower of Babel, although set in the Egypt of Moses: Pharaoh asks Haman to build him a stone (or clay) tower so that he can mount up to heaven and confront the God of Moses.[33]

Another story in Sura 2:102 mentions the name of Babil, but tells of when the two angels Harut and Marut taught magic to some people in Babylon and warned them that magic is a sin and that their teaching them magic is a test of faith.[34] A tale about Babil appears more fully in the writings of Yaqut (i, 448 f.) and the Lisān al-ʿArab [ar] (xiii. 72), but without the tower: mankind were swept together by winds into the plain that was afterward called "Babil", where they were assigned their separate languages by God, and were then scattered again in the same way. In the History of the Prophets and Kings by the 9th-century Muslim theologian al-Tabari, a fuller version is given: Nimrod has the tower built in Babil, God destroys it, and the language of mankind, formerly Syriac, is then confused into 72 languages. Another Muslim historian of the 13th century, Abu al-Fida relates the same story, adding that the patriarch Eber (an ancestor of Abraham) was allowed to keep the original tongue, Hebrew in this case, because he would not partake in the building.[24]

Although variations similar to the biblical narrative of the Tower of Babel exist within Islamic tradition, the central theme of God separating humankind on the basis of language is alien to Islam according to the author Yahiya Emerick. In Islamic belief, he argues, God created nations to know each other and not to be separated.

So, no Tower of Babel in the Quran, but diverse ... retellings of the story without the actual point ... outside it and by diverse authors.

Still, Egyptian, Babylonian, Pagan Greek and Islamic traditions, all of which are non-Biblical, even is Islam shadows the Bible a bit more closely, all of them presume a universal Flood, and it is recent (except for Hindoos, who transposed the Rama story from after Flood and after Mahabharata to back before Mahabharata and the Flood even earlier). This plus awareness of the diversity of languages should push to explaining a radical and short spanned diversification of languages.

Only the Hebrew story (and a near plagiarism of it in Lisān al-ʿArab) actually explicitly has it. So, non-Hebrew traditions actually only indirectly confirm the Tower of Babel, by confirming the Flood and its recency, like the timeframe required for Ruhlen's scenario isn't available.

Obviously, with some linguistic experience and sophistication, this should push the Hebrew story, therefore either Christianity or Judaism, forward quite a bit, or both, even, until Henoch and Elijah come to convert the Jews.

However, linguistic sophistication may be rarer than what as a linguist one might like to think.

Confer this from an early thinker on "computer linguistics", cited in the article I just started this essay with:

When I first got interested in the subject, in the mid-1970s, I ran across a letter written in 1947 by the mathematician Warren Weaver, an early machine-translation advocate, to Norbert Wiener, a key figure in cybernetics, in which Weaver made this curious claim, today quite famous:

When I look at an article in Russian, I say, “This is really written in English, but it has been coded in some strange symbols. I will now proceed to decode.”

Some years later he offered a different viewpoint: “No reasonable person thinks that a machine translation can ever achieve elegance and style. Pushkin need not shudder.”

While Wiener changed his mind because he tried to find solutions and it didn't work all that well, or even when it worked at its best, it didn't work as he thought it would work, many don't try to find any solutions and are really stuck in that attitude : any language not one's own is a coded version of one's own.

I am afraid some people in Russia might be so optimistic on Google Translate that they imagine they can judge the merits of my writing from how it translates automatically by that machine translation.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Pompidou Library
Octave of Epiphany
13.I.2020

* It seems I was confused by a genealogy table that only outlined the ancestry of Greeks, here is a more full enumeration:

Hellen, Amphictyon, Orestheus, Candybus, Protogeneia, Pandora II, Thyia and Melantho are their children.
Aeolus, Dorus, Xuthus, Aetolus, Physcus, Aethlius, Graecus, Makednos, Magnes and Delphus are their grandsons.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deucalion

** Tower of Babel : Islamic tration
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tower_of_Babel#Islamic_tradition