Wednesday, October 11, 2017

Someone Curious on My Take on Babel? (quora)

Here is about my take on what Tower of Babel was, incidentally, on other question:

Where does the oxygen come from when a rocket is flying into space to ignite the fuel?

Paul Feist
Space geek from way back, cut school in 5th gr for Columbia's 1st flight.
Answered 1h ago
the oxygen for the rocket fuel comes from the tank next to the fuel tank, marked “liquid Oxygen”.

Hans-Georg Lundahl
49m ago
What do you think would have happened if at Cape Canaveral one had used Uranium rather than liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen?

A minor Chernobyl also blowing up the top of the rocket, right.

Paul Feist
4m ago
It would help if you learned a little about nuclear thermal engines… it would make reading your comment less awkward for the reader.

Cannot add reply.
In other words, he shut me off from asking preisely what was awkward from his viewpoint as a reader.

I was not considering Uranium as used in thermal engines, but only as used in atomic bombs.

The one use which would, along with nuclear toxicity possibly have been available pre-Flood, and even survived in vague memory over the Ark, and hence, I think Nimrod would have used Uranium like Chinese use gunpowder - if the Confusion of tongues and an ice cap over Canada's Uranium mines and a broader Atlantic had not stopped him.

And by possibly, I mean probably, since there are traces of both uses in Mahabharata, an epic which I think partly goes back to pre-Flood Nodian conditions, while external trappings are more like adapted to more recent things in India and also to certain chariot using warlike societies North of Black Sea, and while theology was adapted to the new idolatry, not yet existing before the Flood.

Use as bomb : Bhagavadgita contains a line which was appropriately quoted by Oppenheim when seeing first Atomic bomb explosion.

Use for radioactive toxicity : rats with radioactive contamination caused loss of hair and nails - known symptoms of too many Bequerels.

And here, I am touching on an old idea of how language families could have been ready directly through supernaturally imposed languages

How do people create languages (not programming ones)?

Answer requested by Eli Rothleder

Hans-Georg Lundahl
I speak two langs, Latin and Germanic. In a few dialects.
Answered 14m ago (19 Views !)
Answering question posed as:

“How do people create languages (not programming ones)?” (I underline the word people for a reason).

  • usually by carrying on the one one inherited with slight differences, which in time add up to mutual unintelligibility;
  • these may among other things be caused by interference between two or several languages someone speaks (I pronounce “e” in “pen” a bit too open, I confuse non-accented “e” and “é” in French, though I do by now know it’s “besoin de début” and not **”bésoin de debut” : both due to Swedish pronunciation habits around letter E)
  • sometimes also by constructing languages, like Quenya or Dothraki for art or like Volapük and Esperanto for communication.

In case you wondered about this last part, it involves conscious use of linguistic knowledge. It always involves the kind of features of a language which are needed to learn it (“he speaks, they speak” : how is number and persons of a verb subject shown, only by separate words or also by ending, or even by ending only, and is ending alternative or agreeing with separate words?) and optionally involves features of a language known to those studying its history (what outcome do you expect of an original “sie camon” and what was “they went” in Anglo-Saxon).

Esperanto for instance involves no fictional or constructed history internal to the language. (Its replacing a Volapük and its being sometimes replaced by an Ido or Inlingua is an external only matter, one would nearly say, since these are constructed on other plans).

Quenya and Sindarin share a common root, a fictional history : Sindarin celeb and Telerin telepe borrowed into Quenya telpe are supposed to come all from same proto-Eldarin … I tried to check on Ardalambion, but Helge Fauskanger took … ah, in the Quenya word list it comes notified as KYELEP-.

There have obviously not been thousands or ten thousands of years in which real elves have been speaking the various tongues, but the relationship between Quenya, Sindarin and Telerin to Proto-Eldarin mimics such a history. And does it really well.

An older take of mine was, therefore, that IE language family could have had "instant history", like Quenya and Sindarin, but a newer one is, between Babel and earliest documented IE languages, some of them were neighbouring each other and developed "areal features" (also known as Sprachbund). One Russian linguist, father of Balkan linguistics, namely Trubetskoy, believed this was the case. He also had a polemic reason over and above his academic ones, he was disgusted with National Socialist searching for Urheimat. These days, Russians seem to have taken over the search, by claiming the language family originated with sth like Yamnaya culture. Obviously, today's Russians, like the back then National Socialists, were NOT in any way shape or form Young Earth Creationist or literal believers in Genesis 11.

No comments: