This will probably bore you to death, but I found it fascinating, so I’ll put it here anyway. It concerns the tower of Babel in Genesis Chapter 11 and the origin of language as a whole. During my last trip to Israel, I met Isaac Moseman. I liked Isaac. He has spent most of his life studying the origin of language and has some fascinating ideas.
Mount Carmel is the historical site for the battle between Elijah and the prophets of Baal. But in modern archaeology, it’s also famous for the discovery in one of the caves of the earliest homo-sapiens with a hyoid bone. This floating bone in the throat is what enables human speech. In his article on “The Origin of Language,” Isaac Moseson argues that scientists are “scurrying around Africa for Paleolithic evidence of which knuckle-walking hominids of millions of years ago were evolving grunts and gestures into what would become words.” He doesn’t deny that some animals, bees, and dolphins, for example, may have some means of communication, but it’s incomparable to the complexities of human speech.
Two things are required for complex human dialogue. First, it demands a vastly enlarged brain for reasoning skills. It’s only with this enlarged brain capacity that humans are “able to process this unexplainable new language ability.” Isaac suggests, “The blown-out brain cavity is suspiciously like the Genesis record of a Creator ‘blowing into the nostrils’ of a man.” The second necessity for human speech is the hyoid bone. Scientists are looking for the origin of language near the Northeast African homeland. Yet, “the oldest hyoid bone for speech ever found was unearthed in the Carmel Caves near present-day Haifa, Israel.” It’s a well-established archeological fact that the Fertile Crescent is the location for the oldest human “attempts at agriculture and literacy.” Isaac thus concludes, “… all the evidence suggests that modern, speaking man emerges in the Late Stone Age in what might be called a Proto-Semitic region.” That’s the Promised Land!
Recently secular geneticists have proven that all living “humans share the mitochondrial DNA of a single woman.” Isaac goes on to comment, “Studies of the male Y chromosome also prove that the human population on Earth was once very small.” For many years, modern linguists were opposed to the idea of all our languages coming from a “mother tongue,” so to speak. But, as Isaac observes, “By the 21st Century, the evidence was so persuasive that now those who oppose monogenesis (All languages come from one language) are marginalized.” He calls the one mother-of-all languages Edenics. It was the language spoken by Adam and Eve in Eden. Isaac says, “The Edenics project has begun to show that the Eden scenario … is the key to The Origin of Language. Languages constantly and naturally devolve into dialects that become ‘languages,’ but Edenics follows the Genesis record (Chapter 11) that there was a traumatic neuro-linguistic event (The Tower of Babel), which was the Big Bang of language diversity.”