I've had a thought that's been brewing about the confusion of the languages at Babel. Most will take this story as a myth or a legend about how the different languages came about. The thing about legends is that every legend has a kernel of truth to it, and I have an idea of what that might be for this one.
The story of Babel goes like this:
The whole earth was of one language and of one speech. As they traveled east, they found a plain in the land of Shinar, and they lived there. They said one to another, “Come, let’s make bricks, and burn them thoroughly.” They had brick for stone, and they used tar for mortar. They said, “Come, let’s build ourselves a city, and a tower whose top reaches to the sky, and let’s make ourselves a name, lest we be scattered abroad on the surface of the whole earth.” Yahweh came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men built. Yahweh said, “Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language, and this is what they begin to do. Now nothing will be withheld from them, which they intend to do. Come, let’s go down, and there confuse their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.” So Yahweh scattered them abroad from there on the surface of all the earth. They stopped building the city. Therefore its name was called Babel, because there Yahweh confused the language of all the earth. From there, Yahweh scattered them abroad on the surface of all the earth. (Genesis 11:1-9, WEB)
Babel or “Bavel” is the ancient Hebrew name for Babylon. In turn though, Babylon as a culture and a people inherited a great deal from the even more ancient Sumerian people, including religion, territory, and language. What’s interesting about this too is that even as late as 500 BCE they were still using the ancient Sumerian language in their religious liturgical and magical rites. When the Biblical text describes Abraham as having left Ur of the Chaldeans, Chaldeans are another name for the Babylonians even though Ur during the time of Abraham (approximately 2000 BCE give or take 100+years) was the city of a Sumeria in the process of collapse.
Ancient Sumerian is considered a language isolate, that is, a language with no known siblings or daughter languages and a part of no known language family (though there is strong evidence to indicate that Basque might somehow be a descendant). Unlike Indo-European languages like Latin, Greek, or Sanskrit it is an agglutinative language rather than an inflected language. Unlike Semitic languages, it doesn’t follow the three consonant pattern of verbs and word cognates. All things considered, it should bear as much resemblance to either language family as a tribal language from Papua New Guinea; none at all.
But what’s really interesting to me about ancient Sumerian, and what throws a bit of a monkey wrench into this are the first person singular and second person singular pronouns. Why? Because they follow both the Indo-European and the Semitic patterns. What’s so significant about this? Because pronouns, because of their very nature, are some of the slowest parts of speech to undergo changes in the natural evolution of language.
To give an example, look at the word for “I”, the first person singular pronoun. In Indo-European patterns, it always follows a vowel-velar-vowel pattern of some kind. Sometimes the first vowel is omitted, sometimes the latter one is omitted, sometimes, as in modern English, the velar is omitted, but you will never see a vowel-dental-vowel pattern, for example. To illustrate what I mean:
Hittite (1500-2000BCE) – uk Gothic (4-600CE) – ik Anglo-Saxon (1000CE) – ic Latin (500BCE-1000CE+/-) – ego Greek (500BCE-present day) – ego
Sanskrit (1500BCE) – aham
In Sumerian, the first person singular pronoun morpheme is “gu”. When you look at a word from the ancient Semitic languages like Hebrew (circa 1000 BCE), you see the elements of this within the pronoun as well, “anokhi”. In Akkadian, a Semitic language contemporary with Abraham’s Sumeria, the word is “anoka.” You see the same agreement with the second person singular pronouns, “you (thou)”, dental-vowel:
Hittite – zik Gothic – thu Anglo-Saxon – thu Latin – tu Greek – su Sanskrit – tvam
In Sumerian, the second person singular pronoun morpheme is “zu.” In Hebrew, the second person singular masculine pronoun is “atah.” In Akkadian, it’s “atta.”
For more examples, the Sumerian word for father is "abba" (Hebrew
and Aramaic, ab, abba) or "adda" (Greek familial, atta). The Sumerian
word for mother is "ama" (Hebrew, em, Indo-European, mater. meter.
etc.). The word for son is "dumu" (Indo-European, sunus, Hebrew, ben).
The word for river, watercourse is "hubur" (Greek, hudor "water"). There
does appear to be a sound change between "b" and "d" between the
Sumerian word and the linguistic descendant depending on the family. One
interesting word is "illa" which means "elevation" but is also the
Akkadian word for "god," "illah" as well as the Hebrew "eloh". There is
also the word for earth, "ki" which is nearly equivalent to Greek "ge".
Also "an" meaning sky isn't far removed from Greek "ano," meaning up.
Finally, the word "abzu" meaning sea, abyss, isn't far removed from
Greek "abusson" meaning virtually the same. There is also an argument to
be made for "dumumus" or "dumutur," meaning daughter, being the direct
ancester of Indo-European "dughater". Interestingly, the Akkadian for
daughter is “ahatu,” which is one dental consonant away from falling
into the same Indo-European pattern. There is also the Sumerian word "igi" meaning eye. It is clearly a cognate of the German word "augo" and the Anglo-Saxon "ege" from which our modern word "eye" descends, and suggesting it as a cognate of the Hebrew "'ayin" doesn't seem like much of a stretch either given how it descended in Germanic languages as "eye" and "oye" (Norwegian).
Now, when you compare the rest of the Sumerian language to any Indo-European or Semitic language, you start running into inconsistencies and differences of vocabulary, but more importantly, you run into major differences in how words and sentences are put together. All ancient Indo-European languages, for example, are inflected in some way using word endings and suffixes to indicate who’s doing the action, when the action’s being done, and what part any given noun plays in a sentence, whether it’s a subject, an object, an indirect object, and so on. So you have a root morpheme like “ama-” in Latin, and then you stick a personal ending on it, “ama+t” to indicate that “he/she/it” is doing the “ama-”. In the Semitic languages, all verbs and nouns are derived from a three consonant root, and the vowels you place in and around those consonants change those consonants into the word you want. So in Hebrew you have “YLD” which can be “YeLeD” meaning “boy” or “YaLDa” meaning “girl” or “YaLaD” meaning “to give birth”. And this is just how the internal logic of these languages go whether it’s Hebrew, Arabic, Syriac, or Akkadian.
Another piece of this puzzle, and something that’s interesting about language is how it’s learned by children. Children are born with the capacity for acquiring and building language, but they are not born with a language pre-programmed. Children will “acquire” a language from what they hear of the sounds which those around them are communicating with. But more accurately, children will “build” their own language based on those sounds and what they assume they mean. Adults will correct their “mistakes” over time so that the language the child builds conforms to the mutually accepted and intelligible version of that particular combination of sounds.
So, how does this all fit in with the confusion of languages at Babel? There’s one more component to this puzzle, and that’s how and where the brain processes language, and what it can look like when it fails. The brain processes language in the left hemisphere in specific areas called the Broca’s area, the Wernicke’s area, and the angular gyrus. There are however different kinds of neurological disorders which come under the label of “aphasia” which can wreak havoc on a person’s ability to speak and understand language. These disorders come from a degeneration of those areas of the brain which deal with speech. They can range from a loss of words, a confusion of the meanings of words, a loss of grammar, and more. This degeneration can be caused by stroke, brain infection, brain tumors, brain injury, and other things which might affect the brain tissues.
Hypothetically speaking, where Babel was concerned, let’s assume originally everyone at Babel, maybe around 3-4000BCE, was speaking some ancient form of Sumerian. Then, at one point, something happened where certain large parts of the population were struck with a degeneration of the language centers of the brain. Perhaps it was Divine intervention, perhaps it was something environmental (not exclusive of Divine intervention perhaps). Maybe it only affected the adults, but not the young children. The adults lose their grammar, or perhaps their grammar becomes scrambled. So, for example in Elizabethan English, you might have the question, “Knowest thou me?” With the grammar scrambled it might come out “me estknow thou?” or Hamlet’s famous quote, “To be or not to be” being scrambled into “not be to be to or”. In an agglutinative language, where words can be built of many morphemes or smaller word components which must be in a specific order in order to make sense, this would be catastrophic for communication.
Where the story of Babel begins to make sense is then when these adults begin to pass on this scrambled grammar and language to their children who were not affected by this language degeneration. (As to why young children wouldn't be affected, it is just a thought, but perhaps the Aphasia only afflicted those on the tower building project, mostly being adults or children capable of working. It would have required potentially thousands of workers, and children old enough to walk and speak were rarely spared from working in ancient times. Something about that project, perhaps something environmental, caused a specific kind of neural degeneration which affected their language centers. As to what the cause might have been, maybe a type of bacteria around the stone being used or something toxic in the stone dust might have caused the neurological deterioration which led to the aphasia.) The children then naturally build their own languages based on the way the adults are speaking, using the same morphemes but in different combinations, and make their own changes of meaning, vocabulary, and grammar as these new languages coalesce. (This is something which has been demonstrated several times by several different groups of children. One that I can think of offhand was in an orphanage or school for the deaf in South America where the children developed their own fully expressive and developed sign language independent of any known version. There are also stories of unethical experiments throughout the centuries of children raised in language isolation from birth developing their own spoken languages unintelligible to anyone but them.) But then one group of these children as they reach adulthood either can’t understand the other, or the other sound like idiots to the one because they “can’t talk right.” And human beings have a long history of looking down on and isolating those and isolating from those who speak differently from them. Eventually these new groups of people move off and away from Sumeria and those people who sound like idiots or barbarians, or they’re forced to by those who still speak “proper” Sumerian. The whole process might take a hundred years or less if a generation is every 20-30 years.
Another observation when discussing the Babel text in Scripture, is that the four main "cradle" civilizations which would have been impacted were all established at nearly the same time. The Sumerian civilization proper was established from an earlier settlement and culture around 3500 BCE. The Egyptians were established as the Egyptian civilization around 3150 BCE. The Minoans were around 3100 BCE. And the Indus Valley Civilization (also representing the Indo-European language group) was around 3300 BCE. With perhaps the exception of the Indus Valley group, these cradle civilizations more or less represent the "table of nations" found in the Genesis account just after the Babel event. So, if we're looking at some kind of a time frame for the Babel event, I would say that it would fall at the beginning of the fourth century BCE at the latest, and probably hundreds of years earlier than that.
Not every language can be realistically linked with any part of ancient Sumerian, but I think there’s a good case to be made for the Indo-European and Hamito-Semitic languages originating at least from the morphemes of Sumerian based on the pronominal structures. Languages like Chinese, Japanese, and the many, many minority languages found in Papua New Guinea and among the Native American populations, in my opinion, clearly have an independent origin from Sumerian. But the Genesis account actually only focuses on the origins of the Indo-European and Hamito-Semitic people groups anyway; that is, only those people groups and languages around the eastern Mediterranean and Middle East as far as ancient Persia. It does not concern itself with the other people groups and languages which must have been in existence when it was written. It is therefore not a stretch to suggest that the Babel account may only be referring to the origins of the various languages within this geographical region at the time.
Is this what happened? I think it’s a reasonable hypothesis that might stand up under a stress test with a few modifications as more data might present itself. I think it does at least present a workable basis for the events of the confusion of languages at Babel as recorded in Genesis. Yes, this is all speculation, but it's possible speculation, which is all I'm suggesting right now is that it was possible, there are mechanisms that would make it possible, and there is linguistic evidence to suggest that morphemes from ancient Sumerian made up the roots of the Indo-European and Hamito-Semitic language families just as the Scriptures suggest.
