Language Origin: a Complete Mystery to Non-Christians (Excursus on Babel, a Different Story)

The original answer is not my own, I'll link to it and give a quote:

How did man create language at first? (Ron Brown's answer, 7 years ago)
https://www.quora.com/How-did-language-come-into-existence/answer/Ron-Brown-120

... It seems to me that how languages began is a mystery. Although I am not an evolutionary biologist, I’m not sure it is even understood how the physical mechanisms for human speech evolved. But given that we can utter the many phonemes that make up human speech, in a population of early humans, it’s still not clear how if one individual finally convinced another individual to think “rock” when he or she made a particular sound that it would lead to a language that would propagate through a population. ...

Now for the debates, and like myself, Ron Brown has no degree in linguistics, but Joseph Foster (retired) has been teaching it up to 2009, as for me, I've studied related subjects (a k a a few languages) but without degrees like PhD or even PhLic:

I

6 years ago

Hans-Georg Lundahl

As amateur linguist, I can second the Biblical story. It makes sense.

Emergent evolution of language does not.

Holy Innocents

28.XII.2025

Joseph Foster

The Tower of Babel story makes no sense at all. It gets the separation and dispersal of societies and emergence of different dialects and languages backasswards with respect to cause and effect.

Hans-Georg Lundahl

You are confusing normal language splits by divergent evolution with a supernatural one.

Peleg was born 101–531 years after a universal Flood, leaving one language. If in Peleg’s day there were different languages that couldn’t understand each other, that was a miracle, not a parallel of Latin to French / Latin to Spanish.

You’d yourself be hard set to pretend Sumerian and Akkadian could have split that fast from a common ancestor, the mainstream would say Akkadian descends from a Proto-Afro-Asiatic spoken c. 8000–14,000 years prior to the first texts and that Sumerian does NOT descend from it, so if they had a common ancestor, it would have to be much further back.

The language split of Babel wasn’t about a common ancestor language, any more than the miracle of Cana about normal procedures in harvesting grapes, pressing them and allowing them to ferment over weeks.

That said, your input is totally irrelevant for what I said. The overall question and my answer were not about the emergence of language DIFFERENCES, but about the emergence of LANGUAGE tout court.

The Biblical story about that is in Genesis 1 and 2. Adam talked the same day God created him, and God eternal could talk before creating anything.

Joseph Foster

OK. I may have misunderstood you. I don’t know of any viable, checkable, supernatural explanations for either how languages diverge from a common linguistic ancestor nor of how language emerged or developed to start with.

Hans-Georg Lundahl

You don’t know how a thing is checkable from history? Speaking of the secondary topic, Babel.

Back to the first. You don’t know any natural explanation for how men supposedly descending from apes have a totally different deep structure in the communication system and it’s supposed to have developed gradually. Biologists don’t claim mammals descend from insects. In “ape” sentence = morpheme = phoneme, and the speech function is never notional. In “human” sentence = morpheme + morpheme + … AND morpheme = phoneme + phoneme + … and the speech function is typically notional, so that even non-notional speech functions borrow the way they are expressed from the notional one. It’s the natural explanation that makes no sense whatsoever.

II

6 years ago

Ray Oberhardt

They didn’t learn a language, it was given to them. The new language replaced the old one. The original language was most likely Hebrew.

Joseph Foster

Not possible. Hebrew could not have been an “original”, let alone “the” original human language. Hebrew is a member of the Semitic Family of languages, related to some other languages including Arabic, Aramaic, Amharic, and some others. That means it shares a common prehistoric ancestor language with them — we call it Proto-Semitic. So Proto-, or Common, Semitic antedates Hebrew.

And for your claim, it gets worse. Semitic is a Branch of a larger language family we call Afro-Asiatic. So Proto-AfroAsiatic is even older, that is, earlier.

Hans-Georg Lundahl

“Hebrew … shares a common prehistoric ancestor language”

Or, at Babel, God as a conlanger mimicked divergent language evolution for some of the languages he knew were going to neighbour the Hebrews.