Tower of Babel vs Linguistics - The Quest for the First Language

Video

by NativLang
published on 09 October 2017

Did one original language shatter into many? The Tower of Babel, the evolution of languages and the quest for Proto-World.

The Tower of Babel is one of humankind's early attempts to explain the variety of languages spoken across the earth. Thousands of years later, philologists and linguists studied the natural evolution of language. So then, what's the true story of language history?

In this video, we'll look at the traditional interpretation of the Tower of Babel story: the Adamic language once split into 72 languages to confuse people. Then we'll consider how historical linguistics compared cognates, established language families and traced related languages back to a common proto-language.

Right where historical linguistics hits mysteries and dead ends, you'll meet the "long rangers". These linguistic mavericks dared to go further back in time. Finally, briefly see why mainstream linguistics dismisses long-range findings as pseudoscientific.

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