The Tower of Babel, the story of how one original language shattered into many, was one of humanity's
early attempts to explain languages.
Thousands of years later, linguists investigated exactly how languages evolved.
When they put the pieces together though, did it look anything like the Babel story?
Or was this just a tall tale?
So the story goes, the whole earth once spoke the same language.
(Reading Hebrew) vaihi khól ha-'árets sáfa 'eháth
One day they traveled to the land of Šin‘ar where they worked together to build a city
with a migdal, a tower to reach to the skies.
Their Supreme Deity wasn't having it though and scrambled their language so they could
no longer understand each other.
This story stuck.
Jewish writers speculated what the original "Adamic language" was and how many tongues
it split into.
Was it 70 or 72?
A Persian contended Adamic might be Syriac, while this Syrian went with Hebrew.
Europeans claimed everything from Swedish to...
Irish, which apparently just picked out the best bits of those 72 original flavors.
Still, Hebrew remained the prime candidate.
After all, it's the language of the story, right?
Details changed but the interpretation held: one original tongue, at a single place and
time, broke into a bunch of distinct languages, in order to keep people from coordinating
and understanding each other.
Then came the 17 and 1800's.
Explorers and trade routes shrank the world.
Distant people discovered each other's languages for the first time.
Intrigued scholars found common patterns that shifted our view of the world's languages.
Some languages consistently looked a tweak away from each other.
Take Arabic and Hebrew ðiʾib and zəʾev, ðakar and zaḵar.
Behind these words there's a regular sound correspondence: where Arabic has ðāl, Hebrew
has zain.
These were cognates, the same word evolving differently in different languages.
Comparing cognates, a picture emerged of a family tree!
Walking back up the branches of the tree, you could reconstruct the common ancestor.
But testing this method in the wild world, the trails of cognates didn't lead back to
a single proto-language.
No, there were clusters of closely and distantly related languages belonging to separate families.
English, Irish, Greek and even Sanskrit were clearly part of an Indo-European
language family.
From the South China Sea to the Eastern Pacific, the languages of Austronesia all shared their
own common ancestor.
And Hebrew, once dubbed the original language, fit snuggly among its kin, one twig of an
Afroasiatic family.
It wasn't even the "purest" or best preserved twig.
For example, it wore away consonant distinctions that its relatives, Aramaic and Arabic, kept.
Also, change turned out to be something languages were doing naturally, all of the time.
Babel still held one intriguing idea over us, though: that original language.
See, reconstructions dead-ended several thousand years back.
Beyond that, historical linguists started to feel like they simply had nothing to say.
Nothing to say, eh?
Well, tie your own hands, but you can't hold back a maverick!
So you established families and reconstructed parent languages.
Well, why not do the same thing again: compare proto-languages for cognates and build families
on top of families?
Families are coming together!
It's a superfamily!!
Enter the late Joseph Greenberg.
Classify languages first, he said, then compare and reconstruct.
Classify first?
Yes, it's called Mass Comparison!
Take a huge number of languages and look for patterns in them.
Patterns in vocabulary, but also in their typology, the comparative structure
of the world's languages.
You know, stuff like: how many vowels does it have?
What's its basic word order?
He cast his net wide and caught some huge superfamilies.
Indo-European, Turkic, Mongolian, Japanese and more belong to Eurasiatic.
And, this one drew tons of flak, but the complicated languages of the Americas are one happy
Amerind family.
Then in the 90's Merritt Ruhlen ran all the way.
He compared vocabulary from across the globe and reconstructed 27 proto-words.
Here it was: our first look at the parent of all living tongues, Proto-World!
Or Proto-Human or Proto-Sapiens if that's your style.
Proto-World had words like *tik, *ku, *ma, *akwa, *kuna!
A decade later, he went after the typology of Proto-World.
Apparently, our ancestors spoke their sentences with a subject, then an object, then a verb.
They put adjectives before nouns.
And instead of prepositions, they used postpositions.
Were we finally staring into the face, or the tongue, of that long-lost original language?
Historical linguists said, neh, and they tore into these results.
These short words could easily be chance look-alikes!
You can't account for borrowings!
The meanings of your "cognates" are all over the place!
Your flimsy method lets you base reconstructions on irrelevant evidence!
Thus, they confidently tossed Mass Comparison into the bins of fringe linguistics.
Pseudoscience.
And yet Babel's first and biggest claim lingers.
The mavericks still swear we're onto something.
Are we?
Or are they telling another tall tale?
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