(November 11, 2012 at 1:16 pm)Brakeman Wrote: How exactly did the Tower of Babel incident cause the birth of all modern languages, all at the same time. Is it not true that modern languages are derivatives of older languages?Did I use the Biblical history of Language? No.
The biblical history of language is completely pathetic.
The Tower of Babel followed Noah's flood. Noah's flood happened 3300 BC or even earlier (it could have happened 5,000 BC for instance). Some have even suggested it happened 5.5 million years ago, and Noah was an Australopithecine. In that scenario it is entirely possible that the entire world's population along with language was derived from Noah! We disagree over where it happened, how much land it covered, and of course when it happened. It was a very significant event, but it wasn't a truly global event the way that a volcanic event in 1816 was.
Nevertheless, if you want to take it literally, that places the Tower of Babel at around 40,000 BC.
Remember, Noah didn't know the earth was round. A flood that covered "all the world" simply meant all the inhabited space he knew about.
The one thing that we agree upon is that the Ark eventually ended up on one of the mountains of Ararat. There's plenty of this region which wouldn't, and couldn't, have been completely flooded anyway.
