Was There a Common Human Language?

''And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech''
-- Genesis 11:1

by Michael Corthell

According to the Bible humankind spoke one common language that was understood by every human being. That universal communication was confused, however when humanity tried to find its way directly to heaven by building the Tower of Babel. As punishment for this transgression, the common human language became obscured, and hundreds of human languages come into being. Whether you a believer or not, there is now scientific evidence pointing to one common language spoken by our early ancestors originating in Africa and the evidence matches the human migration patterns.

A recent study looked at the evolution of words, specifically across Eurasia, and discovered a pattern with words like brother and father that has allowed them to predict how our ancient ancestors would have spoken these words and 21 others, roughly 15,000 years ago. The words and sounds of many different languages were researched from a catalog that is the product of the Tower of Babel project.

The discovery challenges the fundamental foundations of linguistics, which say that languages grow up separately from of each other, with no real meaning in the sounds which form words.

But the research which looked into several thousand languages showed that for basic concepts, such as body parts, family relationships or names in the natural world, there are common sounds or noises that are important to the human experience somehow trigger universal verbalizations. This points to research done previously by Carl Jung concerning the Collective unconscious.

"These sound symbolic patterns show up again and again across the world, independent of the geographical dispersal of humans and independent of language lineage," said Dr Morten Christiansen, professor of psychology and director of Cornell's Cognitive Neuroscience Lab .

"There does seem to be something about the human condition that leads to these patterns. We don't know what it is, but we know it's there."

The research found, that in most languages, the word for ‘nose’ is likely to include the sounds ‘neh’ or the ‘oo’ sound, as in ‘ooze.’

Other words found to contain similar sounds across thousands of languages include ‘bite’, ‘dog’, ‘fish’, ‘skin’, ‘star’ and ‘water’. The associations were particularly strong for words that described body parts, like ‘knee’, ‘bone’ and ‘breasts.’

The team also found certain words are likely to avoid certain sounds. This was especially true for pronouns. For example, words for ‘I’ are unlikely to include sounds involving u, p, b, t, s, r and l. ‘You’ is unlikely to include sounds involving u, o, p, t, d, q, s, r and l.

So, in broad terms, digesting this new information, what does this all mean? What does it tell us? The Bible is accurate and it is a wide ranging teaching tool. It is allegory, it is Faith and it is history and science.

God is the creator, designer, and the manager of us all. What are we to do next? We are to continue to find our way back, back to the time of unity. 

(Below you will, 'listening between the lines', find more proof and a practical way to learn a second, or third,(or more) language).

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One Simple Method to Learn Any Language | Scott Young & Vat Jaiswal 

While few of us will ever take on the ambitious challenge of learning four foreign languages in a year, many of us yearn to be more proficient in another language. The secret to success as it turns out is simpler than you think.