Why cannot you understand what I say? Why cannot I understand what you say? Answer...., or the expansion of the question: Is it retrieval of what was lost in the babel, recovery of the primordial language or building a universal language with a finite set of meanings and interpretations? Incomprehensibility of differences as such, not their conceptualization and interpretations, is what keeps differences in tact, so why decode or de-paradox-ify or destroy (to display deification/humanization?) the Tower? Here is an attempt to answer in this article from New Scientist, War of Words: If language evolved to allow us to exchange information, how come most people cannot understand what most other people are saying? This perennial question was famously addressed in the Old Testament story of the Tower of Babel which tells of how humans developed the conceit that they could use their shared language to cooperate in the building of a tower that would take them to heaven. God, angered at this attempt to usurp his power, destroyed the tower and to ensure it would not be rebuilt he scattered the people and confused them by giving them different languages. The myth leads to the amusing irony that our separate languages exist to prevent us from communicating. The surprise is that this might not be far from the truth. The origins of language are difficult to pin down. Anatomical evidence from fossils suggests that the ability to speak arose in our ancestors some time between 1.6 million and 600,000 years ago (New Scientist, 24 March, p 34). However, indisputable evidence that this speech was conveying complex ideas comes only with the cultural sophistication and symbolism associated with modern humans. They emerged in Africa perhaps 200,000 to 160,000 years ago, and by 60,000 years ago had migrated out of the continent - eventually to occupy nearly every region of the world. We should expect new languages to arise as people spread out and occupy new lands because as soon as groups become isolated from one another their languages begin to drift apart and adapt to local needs (New Scientist, 10 December 2011, p 34). But the real puzzle is that the greatest diversity of human societies and languages arises not where people are most spread out, but where they are most closely packed together. =========== Note: On the problematic of tower of babel, see Derridas Des Tours de Babel, which is also a reading of Walter Benjamin; before that, take a detour of tracing the theory of babel in Aristotles attribution to Democritus and Leucippus and the concepts maturity in Gustav Theodor Fechner, and its earliest application in Kurd Lasswitzs work, The Universal Library (1901) and then in Jorge Luis Borges Library of Babel (1941) and in the scene of the blind monk in Umberto Ecos The Name of the Rose (1981), one of my all-time best. A fascinating work: William Goldbloom Blochs Unimaginable Mathematics of Borges Library of Babel (2008) adds hard mathematical dimension to the theory of babel, applying topology, info theory, geometry, etc. ============ newscientist/article/mg21628941.700-war-of-words-the-language-paradox-explained.html
Posted on: Thu, 06 Mar 2014 14:36:13 +0000