The Old Universal Language, Confounded by Babel

I'd like to make a thread about a topic that interests me, though I haven't really prepared anything to drive the point home. Mostly just presenting the idea. What sparked me making the thread was simply one small idea, where a biblical story may perhaps metaphorically represent the concept.

The biblical story is the one about the Tower of Babel. The people tried to build a structure whereby they could reach the heavens. To stop this, God confounded the languages of the people, many languages being formed out of the one that existed before, so the people couldn't properly communicate.

I think this is a metaphor for a once universal symbolic language. There was once either a universal symbol set, or else a universal philosophic/spiritual system which had pre-defined 'slots' where various symbols could be inserted. This was a sort of divine language which aligned with the archetypes behind the Universe. This system conferred power, but was somehow arrogantly misused by people.

So, the once universal system/symbolic language was scattered and divided into the various spiritual/philosophic systems of the world. The relics of this system remain to this day in our spiritual systems. Even dogma offensive to modern sensibilities sometimes contains a real truth if understood symbolically. I believe it is possible to re-assemble this old Universal symbolic-language. This is perhaps our great task.

The Tower of Babel is definitely one of the most interesting stories to date. If what you say is true, then that would be quite a task indeed, but what if the universal language is not what you think? what if it was not a language at all?

I was having a conversation with someone about Babel a few months ago and what could have been the universal language, he mentioned a theory that I found quite interesting...mind reading

Think about it, the ants do it, the plants and trees do it, even animals seem to communicate through their minds and yet us humans can't even tell when someone is sad or happy anymore. Is it possible that back then we simply communicated with our minds and not words?

I thought this was interesting not a 100% believer but what if? Say it was a God, a vengeful God who wanted to make things hard on us by taking our ability to communicate so easily with one another away. As you and many others think that could very well be the truth, but it seems possible to me that maybe the language wasn't a verbal language at all.

Or maybe it had nothing to do with a God but instead was pure laziness on the part of humans. I think it is possible we all communicated with our minds, but that would likely take more brain power than we use now, so out of laziness we resorted to talking vocally.

I do not know either way and honestly I find your theory just as interesting to think about. I am currently studying Anthropology and the one thing I have realized is that, the more I learn the less I find out I knew to begin with.

But this subject is very interesting, I will subscribe to this thread. Will look forward to any new information you or anyone else might have to add on the subject or anything close to it.

a reply to: TheJourney

We were telepathic,still are,the Tower of Babel shuts our abilitys off.It is still working.

a reply to: TheJourney

Languages change and morph over time. In isolated societies there is little input from outside the society with which to augment the language of the society. It is supposed by many scholars that the Tower of Babble was built in Babylon, which was not a small community. It was a large center of civilization at the time, and certainly open to cultural and linguistic inputs from various surrounding empires. There is reason to think that the influences of foreign languages as well as a fluctuating populace accounted for the breakdown in Babylonian culture.

Babble 2014. I have always been a wordsmith. As a child, we played Scrabble and did crossword puzzles. I have been an avid reader since my childhood in the 1950s. I have watched and participated in several generations of slang developing and in some cases devolving the English language as spoken here in the US.

The other day at the gym, I was showering and in walked two young men. As they spoke to one another I found myself at a loss as to what ever it was they were talking about. The words and phrases they were using were beyond my comprehension. I recall that at that time, I began thinking about this very subject. Might we not be engaged in a tower of Babble situation right now. Generations separated by mutating language? And all within one life time. Nothing to do with God or anything supernatural. Just plain old language, mutating and morphing.

One more thing. A while ago, maybe a couple of decades we started noticing TV and radio commercials speeding up. Speeding up to push more information out in an allotted time. Announcers talking very fast. Now we see it on regular TV shows. Everyone talking more quickly. When people speak slowly, there is a certain vibrancy of their vocal cords. When they speak quickly a higher vibrancy of the cords occurs, making for a higher pitched voice. I have been noticing lately that a number of people seem, to me at least, to be developing higher voices then I am accustomed to. And I also find this difficult to understand as their words pass by more quickly.

Anyway, these are just some thoughts which offer an alternate explanation to the traditional Tower of Babble theories.

a reply to: TheJourney

Maybe we have rediscovered it, and we're using it right now. Ones and zeros.

a reply to: TheJourney

Anybody ever think the Tower of Babel sounds a lot like a space elevator?

I think the effect of confounding the language of Man and the formation of many different dialects over one had more to do with the promotion of war between different states. If we are killing one another then we are hardly lightly to be evolving our spirituality.

a reply to: andy06shake

I agree totally with you about the interfering with the people's language as basically an act of war. We know God destroyed man. I read somewhere that one reason given was that he hated listening to our 'noise'.

If one realises that Yahweh or Jehova whoever , had to use an army to take the land he himself wanted despite the claim he was 'giving it' which obviously enticed the naive Hebrews to fight for him to get it, one is again back into a war situation and a human way of fighting it. Hardly respectable for a superhuman what?

a reply to: TheJourney

I enjoyed reading your comments. I have always found the beginning of the bible, not the Garden of Eden, which is several stories belonging to other cultures whelded together to give the start to the Hebrew bible and link those people to their God.

Its the comments, almost throw-away about the presumably pre-flood era that catch my attention and tells us that the world was fully habitated. This point alone is very interesting because scholars like to say life started only around Africa and the ME but we know of cultures and are finding ancient signs of human habitation, with wondrous skills employed, many superior to our abilities today all over the world, so I don't see any reason to doubt this point.

Next we have the Tower of Babel and its story of confounding the language spoken by the peoples of the world. To me that is purely an act of war against the world by some despot, not supernatural being.

I have wondered about the first language and think we cannot consider it as related to how we communicate today. I don't know I want to go as far as thinking it was tele pathetic. However, we evolved through a DNA chain of life on this planet and so should have the attributes of those different species and certainly the animal, fish etc kingdoms and now we are slowly discovering that even plants communicate silently to each other. So did we have that ability initially I keep an open mind but want to see more about its possibilities?

Ancient people thought so differently to us. We have had the Pagan ways of belief erased completely so we know precious little of the ancient's Shamans, the Animalists etc and so find it impossible pretty much to relate to the way the ancients engaged with their environment. This is very important because we don't know where the change over to speaking a common language evolved. We do know they shared a cosmic and mathematical language which has remained through to today but at what time this happened and when we changed from a symbolic/spiritual world into the pragmatic one we have today I would love to know.

I find it hard to think of a tower being built to reach heavedn or God. Today our thinking gives us mobile phone and telecommunication masts but the tower may simply have been because of pollution reaching up to spoil the view of the heavens so something higher for the priests and calculatores of time may have been needed. It simply got too high or an earthquake toppled it. It seems strange to think that with the fantastic building and design abilities the Ancient people had an irate 'God' would not have destroyed a lot more of their buildings thanjust one tower.

We have the hieroglyphs and pictograms but the symbols and so much information was destroyed by the Chnristians following their agenda of brainwashing people into their flocks. Basically I suspect many of us long for a more naturalist manner of living our lives and are slowly reaching through the engrams of our minds to try to remember what we were robbed of. I suspect the secretive society type groups we have today feel threatened by the ancient celebrations enjoyed by all without secrecy and witheld knowledge.

a reply to: TheJourney

When I think of what the universal language is or was several come to mind
Music
Math
Pictoral
Body Language

There have been many attempts of re-creating a Universal language through out the centuries.

The day we are successful with this attempt, if I am still around, I will be paying close attention !
If we could pull together an attempt and successfully do this, we may just start one of the first steps toward an advanced Civilization.

Interesting Thread ! Can't wait to hear what everyone has to contribute.

leolady

a reply to: andy06shake

Why any omnipotent being or God would require anything form Man is beyond my understanding. Never mind our allegiance and/or participation in genocide in the name of such an entity. Me strongly suspects that's more to do with organised religion than the will of any creator.

Why do God/Gods always require Humans to do their bidding if there so omnipotent?

There ether jealous or afraid of our potential. I suppose that's what happens when you create another in your own image.

Always sounded like a purely mythological story to explain why people look and speak differently to me.
With a dash of childlike "everyone must have been like me once".

A prehistoric root symbolic language surely existed, however, like the plains Indians of North America, it my have involved sign language to a great degree.

Certain simple pictographic representations of natural objects would convey commonly held ideas of said objects (like animals, people, weapons, the sun, the moon, fertility, food, water, etc.)

A phonetic language could have consisted of sounds mimicked from nature including bird calls, roars and growls, and the like.

a reply to: MichiganSwampBuck

Which most likely varied wildy by group.

Khalifa tower?



They have such a lot money to waste and many people still in starvation.

Now that evidence is coming out that man has had a lot of negative mutations in the last
5000~ years, maybe modern language has more to do with stupidity than positive development.

Isolated languages tend to be much more highly inflected than languages that intermix. Icelandic
is much more complex than Norwegian.
Languages tend to be selective as to what features are emphasized. Chinese consciously uses
changing tones, which are barely noticed in Indo-European languages. Vietnamese uses musical tones, so tone deaf
people couldn't speak it.
Russian, I've heard uses more consonants than most languages. English lacks quite a few consonant. English
speakers don't even hear the difference between some. There is an African language that uses 6 cases.

Suppose there was a language that used all the distinctions and only people with very high intelligence could learn it.
Stupid people(

a reply to: Shiloh7

Next we have the Tower of Babel and its story of confounding the language spoken by the peoples of the world. To me that is purely an act of war against the world by some despot, not supernatural being.

Its easy to think that God is suppressing progress, but your implying mans goodness and pure intentions.
Language is a powerful tool that can manipulate and motivate, we see a small dose of what's possible with the likes of Hitler. Hitler thought he was good, but was suffocating mans free will.

I propose that God was not jealous and decided to suppress human progress, I believe he was protecting our Free Will. Nimrod controlled the people, they had no recourse, one langue and one thought. If telepathy was more prevalent back then, then no one could escape an oppressive rulers observation. Because of Gods love for us, he scattered humanity, restored our free will and now we are capable of stopping a dictator like Hitler from ruling the whole world. We have various cultures with different values that act as sort of a check and balance.

While we may have missed out on one great human achievement, we would have done so at the sacrifice of something more valuable, our free will and any future individual achievements.

Perfect for my first post. I've thought about this more than once before.

At first glance it does to me also sound like a story to explain why people DO speak different languages, but with all the other strange artifacts and structures around the world it makes me wonder if it could have more of a truth to it. Science has tried to dive into many bible stories such as the walls of Jericho and the real Sodom and Gomorrah, but I don't think this one can be touched. We have no clues about where it may have existed. For all we know the tower is in the bottom of the ocean or was destroyed. I do know this though. We do have a universal language that may have been rediscovered. Math or as Bone75 said, 1 and 0's. Perhaps the world was once united under a universal language and the first thing they decided to do when they discovered geometry was build a tower to space. This may have been seen as not good for the progress of civilization, so the language was confused and the math was lost for a while.

a reply to: Observationalist

I hadn't intended to give the impression that I thought man had pure intentions, what I was getting at in fact was the opposite. The men involved with taking Canaan were led by a superhuman God, who simply by being a God, should have been able to remove the native Canaanites himself and then give the land to the Israelites, not lead them in battle - which seems a more human approach than that of a superior God. We seem to forget that the Israelites came from Egypt which was already established in Canaan/Palestine as we know from the archaeological record, so their going there would have been purely to grab a bit of prime real estate with a reasonable supply of water in comparison to other places they could have charged off into.

I see your proposal about God protecting our Free Will but how does that fit with the Bible telling us that the world was already fully populated, so humanity had already spread out?

I don't think we fully realise that the civilisations of Egypt and India also were very highly evolved. The temple and its correlation to the human being is sophisticated beyond anything we build today. Despite the fact we have the combustion engine when one looks at our cities and then compares them to the gracious and beautiful buildings and the lessons some of them show us by the mathematical manner in which they are built, (including pyramids from all over the world and their cosmic alignments - which indicate a common mathematical language used for construction and sanctity lost today, one is somewhat hard pushed to speak too favourably about the dirt, pollution and the poverty that most of our cities exist with.

I have trouble today with the concept of our free-will. Today is nothing to do with God, its the State and politics that control our free-will and human rights, which are being grabbed away from us in order to protect those at the top of the pile who wish to stay there and don't want the masses turning against them because they control and restrict for profit, the commodities we all need to live and also benefit when they can arrange wars to be fought, not only to cull our populations but also to grab someone else's assets and, this is where we came in, isn't it?

a reply to: UMayBRite!

5000 years is not even a blink of the eye in evolutionary terms. Not enough time generationally speaking for mutations to have occurred, good or bad.

originally posted by: HarbingerOfShadows
a reply to: MichiganSwampBuck

Which most likely varied wildy by group.

Quite true I'm sure, but most of the basic concepts communicated would be the same. I should think people of very different environments would have a different "dialect" but would still manage to communicate in a very natural and basic way. Just my opinion though.