Re: Did man originally speak a single language?

George Murphy (gmurphy@raex.com)
Sat, 31 Oct 1998 13:47:11 -0500

Glenn R. Morton wrote:
>
> The Bible says that there was an original language that all men spoke.
> Within the past decade some linguists have found evidence of a former unity
> among languages. Not all linguists accept this data, but Joseph Greenberg
> (one of the foremost linguists of this century who produced the
> classification of African languages now in use) and Merritt Ruhlen have
> argued for much wider connections among the languages. One of the ways
> such connections are found is in the same sound being used in different
> languages and language families (cognates). Ruhlen presents a lot of data
> on three of the words which indicate a former connection. The word I am
> going to relate is water. The same sound is found over the world
> representing either water, or activities in and on water, including
> drinking, lakes, rivers, creeks etc.

An interesting post. I am also not a linguist & don't even play one on TV,
but my father was a classical philologist, so I picked up some of the connections,
warnings against "false etymologies" &c. A few comments -
1) One would expect such relationships if humanity had a unitary origin,
apart from possible connections with Gen.11 - in which we are given no details about
the extent to which the tongues were confused.
2) A detailed list such as in your post is helpful but is to some extent
overkill. We know that the Romance languages are derived largely from Latin, so
similarity of Portugese, Rumanian &c words doesn't really add evidence. The same would
be true of some other language families.
3) It's interesting that neither Hebrew (mayim) nor Greek (hydor) has _common_
words for water that fit the "aqua" pattern. Maybe there are rarer words which do.
4) English "water" & a lot of other northern European common terms for the
substance (German Wasser, Irish uisce, Russian voda &c) can be connected with Sanskrit
udan & appear to go back to an original Indo-European root, whose Latin derivative is
unda, "wave". Why some Indo-European languages "chose" a water-related word & some
an aqua-related one as their primary term is one of the interesting questions in such
studies.
5) The fact that one can relate "water" to the Latin word for "wave" shows that
there _may_ be connections between a word for water in one language and a "water
related" word in another. But it often doesn't work. A primitive word for "river"
probably couldn't be analyzed in modern scientific fashion into "lots of water moving
together". In many languages there is no connection - water/river, Wasser/Fluss,
hydor/potamos, mayim/nahar &c. Thus relating words for anything but just plain water to
aqua may be a bit of a stretch.
(My Hungarian-American doctoral advisor told me the curious fact that the
sentence "The train is coming" sounds the same in Hungarian & Finnish. But that's
because "The train" in Hungarian sounds like "is coming" in Finnish & vice versa!)

George L. Murphy
gmurphy@raex.com
http://web.raex.com/~gmurphy/