Reviewing a paragraph from If You Believed Moses

Creation vs. Evolution : Reviewing a paragraph from If You Believed Moses · Φιλολoγικά/Philologica : [In answer to Q on "origin of language families"]

Here is the paragraph:

The traditional, patristic, magisterial doctrine of creation holds that God created all of the different kinds of corporeal creatures during a very brief creation period at the beginning of time by an act of his Divine Will. According to this understanding, God created a perfectly harmonious world for our first parents, Adam and Eve, a few thousand years ago. He created Adam first, and then created Eve from Adam’s side. There was no human sickness, death, disease, harmful mutations or man-harming natural disasters before the Fall. Prior to the Original Sin, all of nature was under the dominion of Adam and Eve and was subservient to them. Even after the Original Sin, early man was physically and mentally superior to modern man, and the early patriarchs actually lived to the long ages ascribed to them. There was a global flood in Noah’s day which killed all of the people and land animals except for those on Noah’s ark, and all of the basic language-families complete with their unique grammars and modes of thought were instantaneously created by God during the Tower of the Babel incident.

Now, basically this is correct.

I have two quibbles. One about Apologetics and one about actual statement.

Even after the Original Sin, early man was physically and mentally superior to modern man, and the early patriarchs actually lived to the long ages ascribed to them.

Here we have the quibble on Apologetics field.

No one in Noah's post-Flood family needed to die before Noah did. This means, if I am right that the first 350 years after the Flood = Upper Palaeolithic from carbon dated 40 000 BP to start of Mesolithic in carbon dated 15 000 BP or even beyond, then everyone dying in this period died a premature death.

This means that the Cro Magnon skeleta we do find from then are people unusually weak or sick or killed accidentally or killed by murder.

This means the dating question is vital. If there were really 25 000 years for these people to have lived, they would arguably have been representative of their populations. As they are just post-Flood, they are not, anyone representative lived for longer.

I don't know if the Shungir man is Noah (which would to my mind be an early date in archaeology for death of Noah, but it would be feasible if instead of 51 years between 350 and 401 after Flood, distance to birth of Peleg is rather 179 years and Babel spanning only latter half. Namely if Peleg was born 529 after Flood). Or, if he rather was one of Noah's grandchildren dying prematurely (location seems to suggest something like Magog to me).

Anyway, unless it's Noah and you need to identify 350 after Flood with .... checking:

Sungir (Russia) is a key Mid-Upper Palaeolithic site in Eurasia, containing several spectacular burials that disclose early evidence for complex burial rites in the form of a range of grave goods deposited along with the dead. Dating has been particularly challenging, with multiple radiocarbon dates ranging from 19,160±270 to 28,800±240 BP for burials that are believed to be closely similar in age.

New Hydroxyproline Radiocarbon Dates from Sungir, Russia, Confirm Early Mid Upper Palaeolithic Burials in Eurasia
Published: January 8, 2014, Shweta Nalawade-Chavan , James McCullagh, Robert Hedges
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0076896

Unless it's Noah and you need to identify 350 after Flood with 19,000 - 28,800 BP in carbon dates, it is at least one, perhaps two generations after Noah, and someone who died before him. No wonder he looks young!

This means, apologists should take this into account - as also the difference between 350 and 25,000 years in Biblical vs carbon dates.

Now, the other quibble is actually about content; about what the traditional view is supposed to be obliging us to believe. Here it is:

... and all of the basic language-families complete with their unique grammars and modes of thought were instantaneously created by God during the Tower of the Babel incident.

I will at once add, what it is being contrasted with is also not correct.

In my memory from yesterday (this library doesn't allow me to open the pdf with "If You Believed Moses"), you see some believing that language slowly evolved from animal grunts adding perfections over the ages ... and that this is what linguistics studies.

BOTH of these views are impossible to a linguist.

For the latter view, the one which says that "linguistic evolution" as studied by historic linguistics means this, that is like telling a man studying dog breeds and their evolution from the wolf that he is studying the Miller Urey experiment's relevance for abiogenesis. Historical linguistics is a very rich field, but every language ever studied by it had a complete grammar, with complete modes of thought. There are things we don't know the correct Etruscan expression for, but that is not because Etruscans couldn't express it, it's because so little Etruscan is left to study (unless you count Hungarian as Etruscan, which some do). The other field, the one dealing with man coming up with language in an evolution believer's perspective, after descending from brutes not having such, well, an evolutionist will believe it, but if he's a linguist, he will also know this is NOT a well established study in linguistics. You cannot compare the stages between pre-Classic vulgar Latin of Plautus and French to supposed stages between non-human and human language. Jean Aitchison will certainly tell you there is a difference in the two studies, she wrote on both. I read the one of her books that I find dealing with a believeable study.*

As to the view just expressed, there are more problems than one.

• To St Augustine and to Targum Jonathas (probably really Targum Jerushalmi), Hebrew was not invented by God at Babel, but given by God to Adam. Hebrews kept the pre-Babelic language as a reward for refusing to participate in the building of Babel. Sometimes not being cooperative is a huge help**. Whether "Hebrew" in this context is Hebrew as the language of Mosaic law or more like Aramaic, language of Peschitta and of Syriac liturgy, is another matter. They are closely related. One of them arguably arose at Babel, but the other didn't.
  
  
• No language family has a unique grammar, and grammars do evolve. Let me spell it out, this does not mean men learn to deal with new linguistic modes of thought. We add concepts as society progresses, like "cars" after Gottlieb Daimler and Karl Benz or like "Platonic forms" after Plato - those are among the subjects we speak about. But we do not add modes of thought. English has 16 tenses, you have simple present and past, and you have up to past future perfect continuous in added complications (I go, I would have been going), and for each, you can in any given sentence find an equivalent in Latin which did not have exact same tenses, or in Greek which didn't either. In some cases the one or other language has an ambiguity and a choice needs to be made in translating, but mainly your categories of thought are the same, even if verb tenses or other morphological categories partly expressing them are not. But this said, language families involve diverse grammars, like English, Swedish, German all being Germanic and all having differences in grammar. And grammars do evolve over time, these three have added and subtracted somewhat different parts of original Germanic (if there was such a thing) language.

Let us now look up a word by St. Thomas, I'll only take objection 2, answer to objection 2 and also a highlight from that answer:

S. Th. Suppl. III ptis Question 41. The sacrament of Matrimony as directed to an office of nature
Article 1. Whether matrimony is of natural law?
http://www.newadvent.org/summa/5041.htm#article1

Objection 2. Further, that which is of natural law is found in all men with regard to their every state. But matrimony was not in every state of man, for as Tully says (De Inv. Rhet.), "at the beginning men were savages and then no man knew his own children, nor was he bound by any marriage tie," wherein matrimony consists. Therefore it is not natural.

...

Reply to Objection 2. The assertion of Tully may be true of some particular nation, provided we understand it as referring to the proximate beginning of that nation when it became a nation distinct from others; for that to which natural reason inclines is not realized in all things, and this statement is not universally true, since Holy Writ states that there has been matrimony from the beginning of the human race.

Highlight: referring to the proximate beginning of that nation when it became a nation distinct from others.

This means, nations have been forming after Babel, after the forming of 72 nations. Both by severing ties and by convergence.

There is no such thing as a complete Indo-European grammar. The fact that there is Indo-European Comparative Grammar means, languages counted as Indo-European have different grammars, that can be compared because they are different. There are at least two different approaches to that comparison : either they started out as one language which diversified into dialects becoming more and more incomprehensible to each other (Latin and Greek, Latin and Gaulish, Germanic and Latin, Germanic and Gaulish, all these pairs involve neighbouring "branches of" Indo-European and all of them are in historic times incomprehensible other than by learning a second language or any other situation of bilingualism or polyglottery).

The other approach is, they were different languages when they started and they approached each others like unrelated but neighbouring languages do. Most languages on the Balkan are Indo-European, but Albanian, Greek, Slavic and Romance are four different "branches", and Turkish is not even Indo-European, nevertheless there are commonalities of Balkan languages, Romanian Romance and Bulgarian Slavic sharing things beyond what Spanish Romance and Ukrainean Slavic share, because Bulgarian and Romanian have been spoken in an area close by to each other with many overlaps and many bilinguals fluent in both, whereas Ukrainean and Spanish have not been so spoken. The very founder of Balkan linguistics, Trubetskoy, took this approach to Indo-European too.

If I take it, there are two reasons.

• 1) we know speakers of Greek descend from Iavan, we know speakers of Persian, insofar as Medes, descend from Madai (it is possible the descendants of Madai originally spoke Elamite, which is not Persian, not Indo-European, as far as any palaeo-linguists have been able to decipher), we know speakers of Lydian descend from Lud the Semite, we know (with some probability) that Crete and Cyprus descend from Caphthorim and that pre-Greek languages there also were what we now call Indo-European : therefore it would seem all these people got radically different languages at Babel, but they coalesced since, perhaps even with a try at making an esperanto (which failed, but influenced all languages involved in the project). This is even reinforced if Aryan or Indo-Iranic came from Caphthorim on Crete and one linguist tried to identify, though he took back as too little supported, an identification of palaeo-Cretan, the language of Linear A, with Aryan.
• 2) Merrit Ruhlen considers all 6000 languages on earth belong to 32 large language families (one of them being Indo-European), and with 32 language families for an original 72 languages, there are three options : instant affinity (which to some extent must hold true of Semitic languages, if Hebrew was pre-Babel, whichever Hebrew it was, unless there were borrowings from Hebrew in order to make some lingua franca between very diverse Near East languages), death of some families totally (this would be the case with Elamite anyway, as well as with Sumerian, as it is generally thought, though Sumerian could have been Nimrod's try at a lingua franca after Babel and could have influenced Fenno-Ugric, Altaic, partly Indo-European - which looks like a bridge between Fenno-Ugric and Semitic - and perhaps also Bantu or Dravidic : with lots of change inbetween), or third, some of the 72 coalesce in larger groups.

Either way, grammars do change, they do evolve.

After Latin future "amabit" and present perfect "amavit" were both pronounced *"amaβi(t)", Latin got itself, or Romance got itself, a new future by saying *"amare (h)aβe(t)" and added a past future *"amare (h)aβe(β)a(t)" (letters in parentheses as per Classical etyma, probably not pronounced). AND this was used to replace one usage of Latin imperfect subjunctive, though that form also still exists in parallel. In parallel, cases of nouns were reduced in number, to two, now one, when it comes to direct ending-morphology, this being replaced by prepositions and by word order. Romanian is an exception, since spoken on Balkan ... it has four cases. Again, this does not mean languages have "evolved" from primitive to advanced. Whatever you can say in French clearly, you can say in Latin clearly. Only puns and other ambiguity are untranslatable between most pairs of two languages.

There was a kind of fad among linguists or perhaps rather non-linguists who had smelled a little on linguistics, to consider older synthetic languages as "backward" and newer analytic ones as "advanced", but apart from associations with pairs like Catholic vs Protestant or Christian vs Atheist or Royalism vs Republic or Aristocrat vs Industrialist, this fad had little to back it up. Whatever a language is used for, it will excel in expressing. If a word lacks, it can be borrowed and adapted to the existing grammar. Classical Greek had no word for gun (however much Tolkien might have liked there to be one for the blunderbuss of Farmer Giles), and so, any text involving guns you translate to Classical Greek (and you do that when learning it) you borrow the Modern Greek word for gun, which is in its turn borrowed from Turkish : τουφεκι. Or you can use parts of the language itself, like when you like my Latin professor call a beer opener "decapsulator" (he obviously translated crown cork as "capsula"). But the modes of thought were already there and already expressable. And are still in some languages (like Greek, Romanian, German, Icelandic, Russian, Lithuanian) expressed in a more synthetic way than English or Persian do. The supposed progress was not such, and you must be really bad at acquiring fluency in Latin before you consider the progression from Latin to French as a progress parallel to human language evovling from animal noises (whether grunts or "bird song" type).

This fad, more than real linguistic theories (the ones dealing with historic linguistics and with socio-linguistics, not "metalinguistics" about origin of language) is probably what the contrasting idea was referring to. I have seen non-linguists pretend "languages evolve, we know that, because linguistics study it" ... which is like saying dog breeds evolve. No bearing at all on evolution in the larger scale sense.

But no language family has a unique grammar, since all have diverse grammars and since also grammatic traits are shared often enough across grammars, and whatever has a complete grammar is a language, not a language family. Nor do language families extant today match the 72 nations just after Babel, see the explanation from St. Thomas Aquinas.

That said, 72 grammars were invented and given as complete grammars to the families of 72 different men. Each group has spoken Hebrew previously (also a complete grammar given by God, Adam only invented certain words in it, when naming animals), each had linguistic competence in Hebrew, each had its linguistics involving memories involving Hebrew linguistics. And one evening, neighbours in Babel were taking farewell with a "laila tov" and next morning they tried to communicate one saying "good morning" and the other "buenos dias". In the meantime, God or his angels had given each linguistic competence in a new language (this angels can do, also devils, which is why omniglots are suspect of being possessed, I'm not an omniglot, btw, I just know Latin and Germanic in more than one dialect each - and know a lot about languages I cannot speak or understand). God alone permantly removed competence in Hebrew. God alone permanently reshifted all memories involving language from Hebrew to whatever new language they had been given.***

Probably, the Hebrew spoken just after Babel differed in detail from that spoken by Moses, like shifts in pronunciation. Equally probably, if a text had been written in Hebrew just after Babel, and left as such, not updated for linguistic changes, Moses would have had problems, but not insurmountable ones, in understanding it, as we would with a text 1046 back in the past of any language we have fluency in, and this said mainly of the ones which changed least, like since 972, English not being one of those. Except of course, if the original Hebrew was Aramaic, as it was later the probable native and one certain everyday language of Our Lord.

As for Indo-European, the earliest language belonging to that group has its earliest text - a decree by Anitta - from times so carbon dated that they arguably at least could be after Exodus and certainly are not much older than Exodus. This leaves plenty of time after Babel for the language, whatever group of speakers it originally belonged to (Gomerites of Kappadocia being one good guess) to have influenced and been influenced by neighbouring languages, in a way even more drastic than English has changed in the meanwhile.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Nanterre UL
St. Lucy of Sicily
13.XII.2018

PS, one rule of good writing being "make sure what you said means what you meant it to mean and can mean nothing else" and being tired, and compared to some swags, I wrote one sentence violating this. "in a way even more drastic than English has changed in the meanwhile." I was not comparing English between 2556 BC and 1510 BC but between the equal while of 972 AD to 2018 AD. Unclarity, if only such to those willing to misunderstand, removed, I hope./HGL

PPS, I left one Shungir after already recorrecting it is Sunghir. My bad, same excuse as previous./HGL

PPPS - previous paragraph unlocked:

Theistic evolutionism holds that God created matter and natural laws in the beginning, and then used billions of years of natural processes, including death, destruction, mutations, and disease, to produce the various kinds of living things, including the human body. Generally speaking, theistic evolutionists deny the historicity of Genesis 1-11 and believe that Noah’s Flood was a local food, that the Tower of Babel incident never actually happened, and that human languages evolved from primitive to more complex over long periods of time.

"human languages evolved from primitive to more complex over long periods of time," - only if Theistic Evolutionists are not Linguists, even Evolutionist ones. Language change concerns languages, the thing outlined here is a theory of language capacity, prior to differentiations./HGL

* Language Change: Progress or Decay?
(Cambridge Approaches to Linguistics) 3rd Edition, Kindle Edition, by Jean Aitchison (Author)
https://www.amazon.com/Language-Change-Cambridge-Approaches-Linguistics-ebook/dp/B000VDKBV4

** Another such occasion may be upcoming:

How to Refuse the RFID Chip Like a BOSS...
Dana Ashlie | 21.VIII.2018
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V8w7VG_powU

*** Removing a linguistic competence permanently without damaging the faculty, as when it was replaced by another linguistic competence, or reshaping irretrievably, not by suggestion, but by definite rewriting, memories of a human soul, that is beyond angelic nature, and can have been done by God alone.