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Babylon - Common Origin in the world’s languages

In Search for a common origin in the world’s languages

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We know the Babylon story in the Bible where the God(s) decided that humanity shouldn’t have a common language because obviously they could achieve wonders like the Babylon Tower that would at some point challenge their Masters (Gods). And then God confused them and multiple different languages were created. Although the same story in other religions/mythologies is that the Gods took people from one place and split them to different places on Earth giving them different languages.

Well, Mark Pagel of the University of Reading in the UK suggests that in the world’s languages today there may be a common ancestor language. Pagel’s team looked into finding common words in different languages that have been the same for thousands of years. Pagel and his team have been building a statistical model for that purpose where they found that there is a 50% chance for most of the words of a language to be replaced in a period between 2,000 and 4,000 years. But that is not for all words.

In a recent publication in a scientific magazine, a new study of the team based on seven major language families suggest that through statistical modelling that about 23 common words can persist through time and sound in similar ways but also have similar meaning among all seven language families. And these words have been the same for the last 10,000 to 20,000 years.

Pagel says that their research suggests that a group of people that used to live somewhere in Southern Europe after the last Ice Age would speak a language that was similar to what we speak today!

Isn’t that amazing? It is unbelievable to see more and more supposed myths from ancient texts verified to be true.

By John Black

 

Comments

The best book I read about language and religion is by the FORMER missionary and current linguist, Daniel Everett called "Don't Sleep, there Are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle". Listen to this snippet and then tell me that it's important for everyone to have a common language and/or common belief in religion: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OEjJgvuH-RU

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John Black

Dr John (Ioannis) Syrigos initially began writing on Ancient Origins under the pen name John Black. He is both a co-owner and co-founder of Ancient Origins.

John is a computer & electrical engineer with a PhD in Artificial Intelligence, a... Read More

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