Masato wrote:Backpacking when you were 15? Wow that's an early start..!
When I was 15 I was more like Canuckster's son, lol
Who is Richard Wagner?
What do you think is likely the oldest root language of Earth? (I have heard Mesopotamia, etc, but other argue India)
Did you ever listen to Robbstar's podcast about the Bock Saga? The guest claims a mysterious scandanavian root language, he even says English is derived from it, gives tons of examples, it was super weird
What do you think of the story of the Tower of Babel?
(babble)
I had signed up for a summer school program where a teacher and a group of kids travel through Europe, and the classes are outdoor lectures in locations relevant to the class at hand. e.g. we did our lecture on Henry the 8th outside the tower of London. I had to use my money from working at McDonalds through the school year to pay for it. I would have ran out of money for food if not for the end of the trip being in Eastern Europe where food is crazy cheap. You could feast for 5 $s
Wagner was a genius, one of the greatest playwrights of all time and some would say one of the greatest overall artists of all time. He was basically a combination of Tolkien and Shakespeare. He studied the history, culture, myths and traditions of Europe like Tolkien, but instead of writing books he wrote plays, operas, music and poetry. He was a German patriot and he focused on tying the spiritual and cultural roots of Germanic tribes into the modern cultural essence of the German people. Naturally his works were a prime target for the allied denazification and demoralization program, though he died 60 years before WW2. A very interesting guy worth researching:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_WagnerMesopotamia was the home to the oldest attested language, but we know language was spoken far before that. For example, the ancestor of most languages from Ireland to Bangladesh can be confidently reconstructed as the language known as Proto-Indo-European(PIE) which spread from the southern Russian steppe across Eurasia around 4000 BC, which precedes Mesopotamia building the world's first cities. Similarly Semitic, Berber, Cushitic and Nilo-Saharan languages have been confidently reconstructed to a single common ancestor, Proto-Afro-Asiatic. We can do things like this, reconstruct languages from a few thousand years before history, but comparative linguistics can only go so far. Attempts to push back further rapidly become less and less certain and more just baseless storytelling.
When considering the question its important to note that humans are not the only animals with language. Studies of chimpanzee chatter reveals that they actually communicate a lot of specific information this way, and the sounds are different for different tribes of chimps. Whales and dolphins are the same. I even saw an article recently about the complex communications involved in bat screeches. The first language as we think of it would have been the sounds used to communicate by the first humans from 200, 000 years ago in East Africa. The oldest attested language we have is from 5000 years ago. So we have a record of 2.5% of human language development, if that. Its completely impossible that we could ever reconstruct the other 97.5% from what little we have. The best we can do is reconstruct prehistoric proto languages like PIE and PAA.
I didn't see that podcast, but its a known fact that Scandinavian languages and other Germanic languages like English and German all descend from one language. Its known as Proto-Germanic and was quite similar to Gothic.
The tower of Babel is a Hebrew myth based partially in reality. The tower itself was 100% real. It was the Babylonian ziggurat atop which sat the great temple of Marduk. The tower was called Etemenanki, Sumerian for "The House of the Foundation of Heaven and Earth." I haven't read the bible(unless in Gothic
) in many years but if I remember the story correctly it said the people of Babylon were trying to reach heaven so god punished them by smashing the tower and making everyone speak different languages. When you consider the cultural context of the story its easy to see why this arose. The Hebrews had been conquered by the great emperors of Mesopotamia. I believe it was Shalmaneser III specifically who made their king bow to him and deported large parts of their population to Babylon so they couldn't start a nationalist movement. The Hebrews went from their tiny kingdom where everyone spoke the same language to a massive metropolitan area at the heart of a vast empire. They would have been used to everyone speaking the same language, and then went to a city where many different languages were spoken, by a people they saw as evil, who also happened to have a massive tower larger than any building they had seen, which bore a name suggesting a link between heaven and earth. The tower was not smashed by the Hebrew god though. When Babylon had been conquered by Persia during the reign of Xerxes II(the guy from 300) the Babylonians rebelled, and Xerxes punished them by largely damaging the tower, but it still stood in an increasingly dilapidated state for another few hundred years before Babylon was conquered by Alexander the Great. To honor the Babylonians he ordered the reconstruction of the tower to its original glory. It first had to be leveled before this could be done. However during the reconstruction Alexander died and the war of his successors ensued. The project was halted, and when the wars had concluded the project was never resumed.
