if the world began with one couple,Adam and eve, how do we have hundreds of languages?

Question

what i mean is, if adam and eve had children, they taught them to speak, how would they move away and create a new language

to me, the reason we have lots of languages is because when the world came about and evolution people were already in lots of different places, so they invented their own language

do you see what i mean

do you agree

thanks for your answers


xxx vici

Answer 1

ah- those crafty bible writers figured you'd ask, so they wrote the chapter on Babel - thats where they give the reasons for all the languages. Its all crap anyway - make up your own stories instead

Answer 2

Way to give the Christians a question they can actually sort of answer!


"when the world came about and evolution people were already in lots of different places"

The human species originated from a single population then spread out. We didn't all separately evolve in different areas around the world, that would be some weird variation of convergent evolution.

Answer 3

Oo, where to begin. You are quite right to question the Adam and Eve story which is clearly riddled with inaccuracies and defies reason and at the risk of offending those who subscribe to it, it is pure fiction.

According to the Old Testament, at some point in our history we had one uniform language that everybody spoke, a universal tongue. This resulted in the free exchange of ideas and an unprecedented cohesion and harmony amongst the human species. As a monument to the triumph of man, a tower was built known as the Tower of Babel. When God saw this he was displeased and smited down the tower with his divine wrath causing the tower to disintegrate into hundreds of splinters which in turn caused the dissemination and diversification of language. God's reasoning was that mankind had evolved too quickly.

Now you can choose to accept this story as literal fact and be perplexed your entire life about the nature of the cosmos and why our divine creator would impede our progress. Or, you can accept that this was an attempt by the ancient world to comprehend the diversity of language and forms of communication on the planet.

Now the scientific and rational view on the subject is that language is not a static, immutable thing but a sort of an adaptive entity that is in a state of flux and is evolving continually. The first homosapiens weren't as widely dispersed as we are now but even so their immediate environmental setting would have affected their language demonstrably. In the same way that genetic characteristics and traits are transferred to next generation, in linguistics and communication certain gesticulations, vocabulary, intonations and accents were taught to the next generation. Different tribes would have had varying languages but as it became necessary to trade and cooperate with other tribes for hunting and the like they learnt to communicate with each other, each borrowing and assimilating language from the other. The inefficient forms of dialect and words would have been pruned until, exponentially, a language is born. After, humankind became agrarian and settled in a certain geographical area the cultural trade and exchange of ideas was even easier.

I sincerely hope, since you have such an enquiring mind, that for a question about human anthropology and evolution of language that you seek a different source than the Bible. The bible does have some salient information and some salutary lessons in morality but it certainly shouldn't be used as a reference book.

Peace.

Answer 4

Genesis 11:1-8 (New International Version)

1 Now the whole world had one language and a common speech. 2 As men moved eastward, [a] they found a plain in Shinar [b] and settled there.
3 They said to each other, "Come, let's make bricks and bake them thoroughly." They used brick instead of stone, and tar for mortar. 4 Then they said, "Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves and not be scattered over the face of the whole earth."

5 But the LORD came down to see the city and the tower that the men were building. 6 Jehovah God said, "If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. 7 Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other."

8 So God scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city.

Answer 5

Language is no big question. From area to area the twang/slang is different even if it is the same language. It evolves as needed. I would rather question that......Aren't we all related if we all came from Adam and Eve? If so....nobody could get married and reproduce. They could but it wouldn't be acceptable. That I can understand with the DNA and genes repeating and causing birth defects. That question could go on and debated far longer than I care to continue. Just a thought tho.

Answer 6

Remember the Tower of Babel in Genesis 11?

Also think of this-you speak English. But you probably could not read or understand English that is 500 years old.

I can see a vast difference in the English of my father's day and mine.

Answer 7

i guess it is a question of seperation. i see your argument but how can that explain how such a small area can produce so different accents and a place like wales so near can have its own language and then you have the gaelic too.
take england for example..its a comparitively small country but from county to county we have such different and varied accents and local terms and words not always used in other counties.scotland uses a lot of different expressions that an englishman doesnt use.
if you then take into account thousands of years of evolution and greater distances involved maybe its not surprising that languages have evolved to be in many forms.

Answer 8

You can think all you want, but God said, that He confounded their language after destroying the Tower of Babel and sent them all different directions speaking different languages.

Genesis 11:7-9

Answer 9

Life on earth started with Eve and the Spirit of our Heavenly Father, Adam came from another father, and from another age, read Revelation 12 and the truth shall make you free.

Answer 10

Nimrod and the tower of bable
Genisis 11:1-9

Answer 11

The religious would tell you that it's because of the tower of Babel.

I'm not religious.

Language evolves as its speakers move, or even as time passes. In the 60s, words like "groovy" and "hip" were part of the vernacular. Now, we rarely use them, whereas words from the beatnik movement in the late 50s-- such as "cool"-- have stuck.

Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese all come from Latin, but they have become their own unique languages.