From: news@fedfil.UUCP (news)
Newsgroups: talk.origins
Subject: Linguistic Evolution / Tower of Babel
Date: 4 Sep 92 03:29:07 GMT
Organization: HTE




As several have noted, there are a number of insoluble problems with
the standard theories on language.

The divide between Semetic and Indo-European peoples is very recent;
there is no real racial difference.  To try to explain the total lack
of relationships between Semetic and Indo-European languages within
the confines of standard theories is futile.  You just don't have the 
TIME you need.  

There is the further observation, totally valid, that all available 
evidence indicates that all known forms of language have devolved into
simpler rather than more complex forms during the entire period of time
for which any evidence is available.  This is what we might expect if
language as we know it had been INVENTED several thousands of years ago,
having not existed prior to that.

This is entirely the case, as it turns out.  Antediluvian language was
telepathic in nature.  This system of communications ceased to work at
a time only a short while after the flood.  Humans were in deep shit
for a while there.  In every location on earth where humans lived, several
generations of them must have spent the bulk of their lifes' energies
developing the forms of spoken speech which we now know.

It figures that groups not in contact with eachother during those first
few decades developed radically different forms of language, despite any
racial or ancestral similarity.  

It also figures that the original logical complexities of the languages
were essentially created works, products of man's artistic genius, and that
virtually all succeeding generations have tended to reduce these complexities
mostly due to simple laziness.

The standard explanation of antediluvian speech follows:

...........................................................

     Did you ever wonder about the universal traditon in folklore
which has animals speaking at some prior time?  These tales go back
as far as anyone can tell.  Aside from the conversations between
Noah and the birds being sent out to seek land which we see in the
OT, older Rabbinical tradition (for instance, Ginzberg's "Legends
of the Jews", vol 1) have Noah trying to order the crow out on such
a mission, whereupon the crow accuses Noah of wishing to make time
with his (the crow's) wife during his absense.

     We know today that a number of the higher animals are
basically bright enough to deal with language, but that most lack
the physical requirements for speech as we know it.  A number of
apes have been taught to use deaf signing conventions in the last
20 years or so as is common knowledge, and it seems fairly certain
that aquatic mammals communicate in complex ways, and a number of
birds (crows, jays etc.) have a rudimentary language which works
for THEM.  Nonetheless, for animals to communicate with humans in
any meaningful way, some other form of communication than our
present speech would be needed.

     It is interesting that ancients generally associated the age
when animals conversed with man with the antedeluvian time, the so-
called "Age of Cronos [Saturn]".  Consider the following fragment
of a conversation between Socrates and one named only as the
"stranger", from Plato's dialogue, The Statesman:


Soc:

     Certainly that is quite consistent with what has preceded; 
     but, tell me, was the life which you said existed in the rein
     of Cronos [Saturn] in that cycle of the world, or this?  For
     the change in the course of the stars and the sun must have
     occurred in both.

Str:

     I see that you enter into my meaning;--no, that blessed and
     spontaneous life does not belong to the present cycle of the
     world, but to the previous one, in which God superintended the
     whole revolution of the universe...  and I might tell you of
     ten thousand other blessings which belonged to that
     dispensation.  The reason why the life of man was, as
     tradition says, spontaneous, is as follows:  In those days God
     himself was their shepherd, and ruled over them, just as man,
     who is by comparison a divine being, still rules over the
     lower animals.Under him there were no forms of government or
     separate possession of women and children;  for all men rose
     again from the earth, having no memory of the past.  And,
     although they had nothing of this sort, the earth gave them
     fruits in abundance, which grew on trees and shrubs unbidden,
     and were not planted by the hand of man.  And they dwelt naked
     and mostly in the open air, for the temperature of their
     seasons was mild;  and they had no beds, but they lay on soft
     cushions of grass, which grew plentifully out of the earth. 
     Such was the life of man in the age of Cronos, Socrates;  the
     character of our present life, which is said to be under Zeus,
     you know from your own experience.  Can you, and will you
     determine which of them you deem the happier?

Soc:

     Impossible.

Str:

     Then shall I determine for you as well as I can?

Soc:

     By all means.

Str:

     Suppose that the nurslings of Cronos [the antedeluvians],
     having this boundless leisure, and the power of holding
     intercourse [conversation] not only with themselves but with
     the brute creation [animals], had used all these advantages
     with a view to philosophy, conversion with the brutes as well
     as with one another, and learning of every nature which was
     gifted with any special power, and was able to contribute some
     special experience to the store of wisdom, there would be no
     difficulty in deciding that they would be a thousand times
     happier than the men of our own day.  Or, again, if they had
     merely eaten and drunk until they were full, and told stories
     to one another and to the animals, such stories as are now
     attributed to them, in this case also I should imagine the
     answer would be easy.  But, until some satisfactory witness
     can be found for the love of that age for knowledge and
     discussion, we had better let the matter drop and give the
     reason why we have unearthed this tale, and then we shall be
     able to get on.  In the fullness of time, when the change was
     to take place, and the earth-born race had all perished, and
     every soul had completed its proper cycle of births and been
     sewn in the earth her appointed number of times, the pilot of
     the universe let the helm go and retired to his point of view; 
     and then fate and innate desire ruled the motion of the
     world...

     And the world turning round with a sudden shock, being
     impelled in an opposite direction from beginning to end, was
     shaken by a mighty earthquake, which wrought a new destruction
     of all manner of animals...

     While the world was aided by the pilot in nurturing the
     animals, the evil was small, and great the good which he
     produced, but after the separation, when the world was let go,
     at first all proceeded well enough;  but, as time went on,
     there was more and more forgetting, and the old discord again
     held sway and burst forth in full glory;  and, at last, small
     was the good, and great the admixture of evil, and there was
     danger of universal ruin to the world,  and to the things
     contained in him [the world]...

     And so, we have arrived at the real end of this discourse; for
     although there might be much to tell of the lower animals, and
     of the conditions out of which they changed and of the causes
     of the change, about men there is not much, and that little is
     more to the purpose.  Deprived of the care of God, who had
     possessed and tended them, they were left helpless and
     defenseless, and were torn in pieces by the beasts, who were
     naturally fierce and had now grown wild.

     And in the first ages, they were still without skill or
     resource;  the food which had once grown spontaneously had now
     failed, and as yet they knew not how to procure it, because
     they had never felt the pressure of necessity.  For all these
     reasons, they were in a great strait;  whereupon also the
     gifts spoken of in the old tradition were imparted to man by
     the gods, together with so much teaching and education as was
     indispensable;  fire was given to them by Prometheus...


.................................................................

     Interesting, no?  How universally the ancients regarded the
age just prior to the flood as such a near perfect state...  We
have a fairly clear statement that whatever condition had permitted
conversation between men and beats perished with or shortly after
the flood.  It is precisely because of a number of these complex
details of the former age in literature that I feel so strongly
that the tale cannot be fiction;  nobody works that hard at making
up a total fabrication that complicated, with so many ramifications
and logical consequences, all worked out and logically consistent
in such exquisite detail.

     Consider the following.  The ability which even chimps show in
the directions of language means that humans should have been
language-capable at a considerable time prior to our arrival into
our present state, our present three basic races.  Humans have
existed in roughly their present form for many years.  Given the
smooth and continuous evolution of both geological and biological
forms which contemporary science accepts, man's languages should all
show some relation.

If, as seems overwhelmingly likely, the white and black races are
very recent branches of the same family, their languages should show
strong relationships.  As far as anybody has ever shown, African and
European languages are totally unrelated.


Certainly Semitic and Indo-European languages should be related, since
the peoples are not racially different.  The divide between Indo-European
and Semetic peoples cannot possibly be more than a few thousand years into
the past. This is an area in which standard explainations totally break
down.  There is no relationship between Indo-European (Japhetic) and
Semetic languages at all.


What we actually observe is about what we would expect had communications
been of some other nature until some event roughly 5000 - 10000 years
in the past, at which time a need for our present form of speech arose
and groups living in proximity to one another developed separate languages.


Hence although even Russian is entirely similar in operation to our
Western languages, Indo-European, Asiatic, Semitic, and African
languages show no signs of similarity whatsoever.                 
   
Like the enigma of the giant animals, we have another
situation which is totally inexplicable given current beliefs
regarding the history of our world and solar system.  The more the
urgency that that system be dropped in the simple interest of
preserving the integrity of science.


Tricia borawski, The Dorsai Diplomatic Mission, recently noted that:


  12.  If man and languages "evolved", the earliest languages should be
       the simplest.  On the contrary, as one studies languages that are
       increasingly ancient, such as Latin (200 B.C.), Greek (800 B.C.),
       and Vedic Sanskrit (1500 B.C.), they become INCREASINGLY COMPLEX
       with respect to syntax, cases, genders, moods, voices, tenses,
       and verb forms.  The evidence indicates that languages do not
       Evolve, they DEvolve.

Due to some set of circumstances of the antedeluvian world, in all
likelihood involving the greater electromagnetic nature of the world
during the age of Kronos, the world was then engulfed in a form of
telepathic communion shared not only by man but by higher creatures as
well.  Richard Heinberg ("Memories and Visions of Paradise", Tarcher
1989, cites a number of references similar to the selection from
Statesman:

  Frank Waters "Book of the Hopi", cites a Hopi Indian tradition having
  the first people "felt as one and understood eachother without
  talking".
 
  Aesop:  "...during the time of the Golden race [the age of Kronos] ...
  animals had articulate speech and knew the use of words...  Arthur
  Lovejoy & George Boas "Primativism and Related Ideas in antiquity,
  Johns Hopkins Press, 1935

  Empedocles:  "All were gentle and obediant to men, both animals and
  birds, and they glowed with kindly affection towards one another."


Heinberg cites a very strange disconnect in the book of Genesis.  God
speaking to Adam and the first andtedeluvians:

   Genesis 1:29 / 1:30 "And God said 'behold, I have given you every
   herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every
   tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yeilding seed; to you it
   shall be for meat.
  
   "And to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and
   to everything that creepeth upon the earth, wherein there is life, I
   HAVE given every green herb for meat:  and it was so.

So that we have Genesis claiming that all living creatures were
vegetarians prior to the flood, and the division of languages, after
which creatures of varied sorts no longer understood nor could
communicate with eachother.

Then, we hear God speaking to Noah (and to man generally) after the
flood and the division of speech:

   Genesis 9:2 / 9:3 "And the fear of you and the dread of you shall be
   upon every beast of the earth, and upon every fowl of the air, upon
   all that moveth upon the earth, and upon all of the fishes of the
   sea;  into your hand are they delivered.

   "Every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you;  even as the
   green herb have I given you all things."


This is a total 180 degree change in world-view.  This is the reality of
the so-called Fall of Man.

Yuppie science teaches us that phonetic alphabets arose only within the
last 5000 years or so because only then did man become bright enough to
figure the idea out, after having lived and spoken for many tens of
thousands of years prior.  There is a far better explanation.  Phonetic
alphabets arose after the RECENT rise of spoken speech.  This means that
Egyptian heiroglyphics as well as the Chinese style of writing hark back
to an age when our present form of speech did not exist.  Given the
realities of antedeluvian communication, the idea of a phonetic alphabet
should not have arisen.

     My apologies to believers in "Nostradus" or whatever you're
calling it these days;  it is my belief that you're basically
trying to pound a square peg into a round hole, i.e. REALIZING the
truth of the logical requirement stated above, you are trying to
force facts to fit.  Look at the words for the basic numbers one to
four in Indo-European languages:  unos, dos, tres, quattro...  une
deux, trois, quatre...  odin, dva, tri, chitere...  one, two three,
four...  ...  If there were ANY relation betrween any of these
languages and, say, Hebrew or Assyrian, there would be some such
similar close similarity;  there is none at all.  Nostradus is like
the dogma of the Mormons who, realizing that the American Indians
would perforce have had to have had knowledge of Christ if Christ
were indeed the son of God, simply invented the needed evidence.

     The basic answer to all of this, the only answer possible,
involves the phenomenon which we refer to as telepathy.  The answer
is that, during the prior age during which the electro-magnetic
nature of the world was far stronger than it is now, for which
there is ample geological and anthropological evidence, this
phenomenon, so rare in our own world, was the normal means of
conversation, both amongst men and amongst a number of higher
animals.  Then, shortly after the flood, came a day in which the
conditions which had allowed for this broke down:

Genesis 11,1:

     "And the whole earth was of one language and of one speech.

Genesis 11,4:

     "And they said, "Go to, let us build us a city and a tower,
     whose top may reach unto heaven;  and let us make us a name,
     lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth."

Genesis 11,6:

     And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have
     all one language;  and this they begin to do:  and now nothing
     will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do."

Genesis 11,7:

     "Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language,
     that they may not understand one another's speech












-- 
Ted Holden
HTE

Newsgroups: talk.origins