4 And they said: 'Come, let us build us a city, and a tower, with its top in heaven, and let us make us a name; lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.'
5 And the LORD came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded.
6 And the LORD said: 'Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is what they begin to do; and now nothing will be withholden from them, which they purpose to do.
7 Come, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech.'
8 So the LORD scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth; and they left off to build the city.
9 Therefore was the name of it called Babel; because the LORD did there confound the language of all the earth; and from thence did the LORD scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth.Language has always fascinated me. Vocal communication allows us to go beyond the basic physical cues of body language to exchange the most profound thoughts and ideas, and the deepest of emotions. Language is what enables the human race to achieve marvels - splitting the atom, building towers that reach to the sky, landing a man on the moon, and peering into the illimitable beauty of the farthest reaches of the cosmos.
Of course, I am biased towards written language. I can make these strange little marks on a piece of paper, or a slab of stone, or a sheet of lambskin, or on a digital screen, and five hundred years from now, people will be able to discern my experiences, my humor, my wisdom, the essence of who I was, and what I did while I was here.
We are arriving very quickly to a point where technology will not only allow us to record every minute of our lives in real-time 3D, from the moment of our conception to the second of our death, but will make it imperative.
Perhaps it is the ultimate irony of the human condition that the very tool, developed over eons of time, that let's us cooperate as a species to extend ourselves into the infinite and the infinitesimal universe, is also the very thing that keeps us apart, and may very well lead to our eventual destruction.
Very nicely put -- from one linguist to another. I remember when they were trying to create a universal language (I think it was Esperanto). Hope tried learning it, but I really didn't think it was going to go anywhere (remember the attempted switch to metric here in the States?) I truly think that the Internet has done away with the need for a universal language. The translators are getting so accurate that people don't need to know a site's language to figure out what is being said - just click on the link at the top of the page.
ReplyDeleteI think Esperanto was the Indian who taught the Pilgrims how to plant corn!
ReplyDeleteThat would be Squanto.
DeleteLOL. Our favorite Thanksgiving book is "Squanto: Friend of Pilgrims."
Delete