Babel Again
I read this blog on May 5 and immediately sent off the following e-mail. No answer yet.
Prof. Wood,
You are a very hard man to contact. Why have a blog if reader's can't post responses?
In any case I was curious about this statement of yours:
I believe that God punished the builders of Babel by miraculously confusing their languages.
Can you clarify something for me? Pardon the length, but it easiest if I ask a series of questions:
1. Was English created at the time the languages were confused?
2. If so, who spoke it, and where did they live? How and when did they get to England?
3. If English was created by confusion, was it Old English, Middle English, or Modern English? or were all three languages created separately? If yes, how did the three different languages come to England at different times in the Medieval period without a population replacement?
4. Or was only Old English created, and Middle and Modern English develop from Old English in the way envisioned by linguistic-historical theory? If that is the case, did Old English develop from Old Saxon? Old Saxon, from Proto-Germanic? Proto-Germanic from Proto-Indoeuropean? Where would naturalistic development stop and miracle intervene? What about languages that are know to be older than 5000 years? Such as Proto-Indoeuropean and the much older proto-Language that is ancestral to PIE and Proto-Semitic? What about documents written in Sumerian in Proto-cuneiform script that are more than 6000 years old? How can you explain those?
5. Since you aren't a philologist, how can you be so confident that everything discovered by philology is wrong? Have you ever called for the abolition of any department of Classics, Ancient Near Eastern languages, philology, or linguistics at you institution on the grounds that they are giving mis-information to students, and if not, why not?
Cheers,
[name redacted]
p.s.: the last name is Scots, a word for ceremonial dagger borrowed from Old Norse, which was one of the three languages along with Old English and Danish common in Britain in the 9th to 12th century that shared roots but not endings, so that Middle English and Scotts arose as pidgins among them with the grammatical endings truncated. Now how does that relate to God confusing the languages at Babel, again...
Prof. Wood,
You are a very hard man to contact. Why have a blog if reader's can't post responses?
In any case I was curious about this statement of yours:
I believe that God punished the builders of Babel by miraculously confusing their languages.
Can you clarify something for me? Pardon the length, but it easiest if I ask a series of questions:
1. Was English created at the time the languages were confused?
2. If so, who spoke it, and where did they live? How and when did they get to England?
3. If English was created by confusion, was it Old English, Middle English, or Modern English? or were all three languages created separately? If yes, how did the three different languages come to England at different times in the Medieval period without a population replacement?
4. Or was only Old English created, and Middle and Modern English develop from Old English in the way envisioned by linguistic-historical theory? If that is the case, did Old English develop from Old Saxon? Old Saxon, from Proto-Germanic? Proto-Germanic from Proto-Indoeuropean? Where would naturalistic development stop and miracle intervene? What about languages that are know to be older than 5000 years? Such as Proto-Indoeuropean and the much older proto-Language that is ancestral to PIE and Proto-Semitic? What about documents written in Sumerian in Proto-cuneiform script that are more than 6000 years old? How can you explain those?
5. Since you aren't a philologist, how can you be so confident that everything discovered by philology is wrong? Have you ever called for the abolition of any department of Classics, Ancient Near Eastern languages, philology, or linguistics at you institution on the grounds that they are giving mis-information to students, and if not, why not?
Cheers,
[name redacted]
p.s.: the last name is Scots, a word for ceremonial dagger borrowed from Old Norse, which was one of the three languages along with Old English and Danish common in Britain in the 9th to 12th century that shared roots but not endings, so that Middle English and Scotts arose as pidgins among them with the grammatical endings truncated. Now how does that relate to God confusing the languages at Babel, again...