Nope, the Divine Name is Not Tahreef

2600 Years Buried… The ARTIFACT That Islam Never Expected Christians to Find!
Roar of Grace | 5 Dec. 2025
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3TvMwBfh1rE

Sharing: "Male Distress is Medicalised"

Dark Tetrad Divorce: The Pattern Fathers Aren’t Warned About
Hannah Spier, MD | 1 Jan. 2026
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXoT0_8D3no

[The system is not just biassed against men in conflict with a woman, but also in other conflicts, for instance with a group.

In such cases, it can be biassed against women too, and also in conflicts with parents or teachers.]

She's So Eager to Laugh at Jesus, She Destroys the OT and Second Temple Judaism

Christians Think This Is Deep. Jews Laugh.
Rebecca Bar Sef | 2 Jan. 2026
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIulq4QPjmU

5:56 You are wrong. What happens in Ruth is stated in Deuteronomy 25:9.

With the modification, she doesn't spit in the face, because she actually wants the less close relative, Boaz.

And in Genesis 38, Onan is not killed for refusing the levirate, he's killed for the contraceptive act. Levirate is in fact not a legal obligation before Moses. With Onan, it had been a kind of moral obligation when pretending to obey his father, but he could have said "I don't want her if I'll make a child for my dead brother" and God wouldn't have killed him, Judah would have found someone else.

6:41 First of all, there was not actually a change, other than when Moses made levirate an obligation and also gave a way out (which Boaz and the other kinsman didn't recall all details of).

In Genesis 38 levirate was not a universal obligation, it was just a question of what Judah had ordered his son Onan.

Second, the thing is, the point is that her infertility (or that of seven brothers) makes for repeated levirates, the Sadducees didn't state it was a contemporary case.

The reason they took this ridiculous setup is pretty much that some Pharisees already had an answer if she had been divorced and remarried (to the one who didn't divorce her presumably) and if she had been widowed after already having children (not sure, but probably to the first man). They were wrong, but not wrong to believe in the Resurrection, and Jesus gives the real solution.

7:20 Since He is eternally God before in time becoming Man, He was able to provide an answer, even with no actual previous revelation on the topic.

8:07 No, the argument is not the least absurd, since God says "I am the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob" and not "I was etc"

The two statements God made of Himself, and Jesus is the same person Who made them, as Word, He is the one Who spoke, only fit together if Abraham, Isaac and Jacob are still somehow alive and especially if that partial life (a k a blessed afterlife) will be restored to full life.

You can guess people were laughing, but that means you opt out of answering the argument. So did they, but not because they saw nothing in it.

I think everyone who argued with Jesus when He and they were adults already knew since He was twelve, He could back up any argumentative challenge He made.

Mighty

@Mighty-ue7bt

Also Moses and Elijah appeared to be speaking to Jesus in the mountain of Transfiguration. Clearly Moses and Elijah are still living

Hans-Georg Lundahl

@hglundahl

@Mighty-ue7bt Elias is.

Moses came up from the dead.

8:17 If Abraham was a spirit, already that defeats the general idea of Sadducees.

Here is a passage on how Abraham was at this time alive:

And it came to pass, that the beggar died, and was carried by the angels into Abraham's bosom. And the rich man also died: and he was buried in hell And lifting up his eyes when he was in torments, he saw Abraham afar off, and Lazarus in his bosom And he cried, and said: Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus, that he may dip the tip of his finger in water, to cool my tongue: for I am tormented in this flame And Abraham said to him: Son, remember that thou didst receive good things in thy lifetime, and likewise Lazarus evil things, but now he is comforted; and thou art tormented

And besides all this, between us and you, there is fixed a great chaos: so that they who would pass from hence to you, cannot, nor from thence come hither And he said: Then, father, I beseech thee, that thou wouldst send him to my father's house, for I have five brethren That he may testify unto them, lest they also come into this place of torments And Abraham said to him: They have Moses and the prophets; let them hear them But he said: No, father Abraham: but if one went to them from the dead, they will do penance

And he said to him: If they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they believe, if one rise again from the dead [Luke 16:22-31]

In case you think Jesus "was making it all up" out of nowhere, here is a passage on how Jeremias was alive on a previous occasion:

So he armed every one of them, not with defence of shield and spear, but with very good speeches and exhortations, and told them a dream worthy to be believed, whereby he rejoiced them all Now the vision was in this manner: Onias who had been high priest, a good and virtuous man, modest in his looks, gentle in his manners, and graceful in his speech, and who from a child was exercised in virtues, holding up his hands, prayed for all the people of the Jews After this there appeared also another man, admirable for age, and glory, and environed with great beauty and majesty Then Onias answering, said: This is a lover of his brethren, and of the people of Israel: this is he that prayeth much for the people, and for all the holy city, Jeremias the prophet of God Whereupon Jeremias stretched forth his right hand, and gave to Judas a sword of gold, saying

Take this holy sword a gift from God, wherewith thou shalt overthrow the adversaries of my people Israel [2 Machabees 15:11-16]

In other words, Jesus is agreeing with the author of II Maccabees. And with events that had occurred under the resistance against Nicanor.

But this kind of spirit existence is not the end. Here:

For I know that my Redeemer liveth, and in the last day I shall rise out of the earth And I shall be clothed again with my skin, and in my flesh I will see my God [Job 19:25-26]

I shall be clothed again with my skin, in my flesh I will see my God.

The reason Jesus didn't quote II Macc. 15 or Job 19 is, Sadducees disputed the canonicity of them. Hence "God of the living" / "God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob".

8:47 OK, the argument about the wife of seven brothers is "ridiculous", and that's why Jesus brought the argument back to basics.

God of Who? Living. Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

Nevertheless, your admission in the text added in edit "later Jews started to argue about it, because they lost their minds" is also an admission you do not represent the continuity of Judaism. You represent a kind of rehash of Sadducee thought, after millennia that it was a nono even to Jews. Like the "13 words" of your Rambam, bad enough in denying the Messias had already come, but at least are better than you.

8:55 But who pretends all religious truth has to be immediately for the betterment of society?

Not the God of the living. Not the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Not the God-Man Who rebuked the Sadducees.

9:04 Once I die, I lose control.

However, this is what Paul said, recall the man who had studied under Gamaliel?

And as it is appointed unto men once to die, and after this the judgment: [Hebrews 9:27]

In other words, the one Who does control what happens takes into account how you acted before you die.

Who Started the Flat Earth Nonsense (I Have My Theory)

What Do Flat Earthers Actually Believe?
Fact Quickie | 30 Dec. 2025
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnDzWQDt8e0

As a Geocentric, I have a feeling Flat Earth (apart from Hindus, where Vedic astronomy is non-globe Earth), is artificially supported to deflect attention from Geocentrism.

And to get people rebutting Geocentrism unefficiently boosting their essay or video by giving them a chance of rebutting Flat Earth very efficiently.

I

Ryan Trevett

@GuardianSoulkeeper

Harder to debunk than a flat earth but still easy. Even Bob "Mr. 15° per hour" Knodel accomplished that using a ring laser gyroscope.

And he was a flat earther!

I mean if you don't have tens of thousands of dollars of space-age technology to hand you can just casually observe man-made satellites passing over your head and ask yourself why, assuming the Earth is stationary, don't those satellites just trace the same path over the Earth's surface over and over.

Orbital planes and the whole concept of ya know...momentum aren't exactly well known for spontaneous rotation.

Hans-Georg Lundahl

@hglundahl

@GuardianSoulkeeper "why, assuming the Earth is stationary, don't those satellites just trace the same path over the Earth's surface over and over."

I'm not sure I understand your point. I'm not even sure you understand it.

If you meant Geostationary satellites, I've answered it like, they are stationary in relation to Earth, but moving in the surrounding Aether, like this is also the reason why a stone dropped at the equator doesn't fall 450 m further West by moving with the Aether, it was already moving through it.

If the point was different from Geostationary satellites, I didn't understand it.

Ryan Trevett

@hglundahl OK. Do you know what an orbital plane is?

In geometry, a plane is just a 2-dimensional surface that extends infinitely in two dimensions, defined within a 3d volume.

An orbital plane is simply a 2d plane on which an orbital path resides. This is because, in an ideal orbit (an object orbiting a point in space with no external influence) the orbital path only moves in two dimensions. This means the orbital path will stay the same and the object will just trace the same path over and over forever.

Now also consider the claim the Earth isn't moving. If an object in orbit is tracing the same path and the Earth isn't rotating, that means the man-made satellites we can see above our heads should be moving over the same parts of the Earth over and over.

Eg if I happen to be under the path of the ISS, I should be able to see it every 90 minutes or so every time it completes one orbital circuit.

But I don't. Nobody does. You see it once then have to wait several hours for the Earth to bring you back under its orbital path again.

Is that clearer?

Hans-Georg Lundahl

@GuardianSoulkeeper Somewhat.

Tentatively, I would say, the Aether changes the orbital plane for the ISS. I presume I could add "so it fluctuates."

@GuardianSoulkeeper Or, "so it rotates around Earth"

Ryan Trevett

@hglundahl What Aether?

Hans-Georg Lundahl

@GuardianSoulkeeper The same one which Mitchelson Morley would have disproven if Earth had been moving + the Einsteinian "substance of space-time" or I'd settle for "substance of space".

Ryan Trevett

@hglundahl If the Aether is imparting sufficient force on man-made satellites to rotate their orbital planes at 15° per hour, how come it's having no impact on the rotation of the Earth?

Hans-Georg Lundahl

@GuardianSoulkeeper The Aether isn't imparting any force at all, it's just the space that's displaced around Earth.

The reason it doesn't make Earth rotate is, God keeps Earth still. Presumably only rotates part of the Aether, between Earth surface and above the Fix Stars.

II

Matuse

@Matuse

Geocentrism is only slightly less dumb than flat earth.

I answered

approximately:

Yeah, slightly, it can actually work and hasn't been refuted / cannot be refuted.

Matuse

@hglundahl It can't work and it's been refuted by Copernicus and Gallileo for more than 500 years.

[This was his (or her) second remark, the first and my response to both, have disappeared, and do NOT appear when I click "show all comments" ... but I could retrieve the first one from the feed, and insert another, and for next time, I was prepared.]

I answered

approximately:

Neither of them refuted a stationary Earth, if you meant they refuted the Ptolemaic system, true story, but that's not sufficient to refute a stationary Earth given there is the Tychonian system, which neither of them refuted.

Matuse

@hglundahl Both of them proved heliocentrism, which requires an orbiting Earth. Anybody at all can prove the Earth is not stationary. It's very, very easy.

Hans-Georg Lundahl

@Matuse If it's that easy, why don't you do it, instead of telling me they did it?

If Someone Wonders, Hoods as I Wear were Male in the Middle Ages

Two images. On both the lady is wearing other headgear, on both the man has the hood pushed back from the head:

They are different time stamps on this one:

@LordJohnHD
Medieval Fashion Show #history #medieval #fashion
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/5p9EtPi3lM8

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 Phil. Lic:

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.

Joseph Foster

The Adam - Eve story and Adam being given power to name things is not “checkable from history”, if that’s what you’re claiming. Indeed, “God did it” adduced as an explanation is not checkable. It’s not vulnerable to disproof.

29.XII.2025

Hans-Georg Lundahl

God did it is vulnerable to disproof, like “it didn’t happen in the first place” …

The part I’m speaking of is not Adam being authorised to name beasts. The part I speak of is, he was created with language. When God gave him the task, he understood what he was supposed to do.

Your preference for the “natural” explanation isn’t very vulnerable to disproof within Atheist circles. Every alternative leading to God did it will on your part be dismissed as “not vulnerable to disproof” …

The only natural explanation possible for man speaking is man always having spoken. Not just “for as long as man has existed” but literally always, so man had to always exist. Since we can know even the universe didn’t, that one is out.

Joseph Foster

Nope.

And natural, i.e. scientific explanations are always vulnerable to disproof / empirical discreditation.

“God did it.” is no explanation at all. It is generally used to choke off further investigation or search for explanation. It doesn’t have to be — we could still enquire after the means and processes by which it was done. But you don’t seem to want that further enquiry.

Hans-Georg Lundahl

“vulnerable to disproof / empirical discreditation.”

Except among atheists when the thing credited BY the empirical discreditation is God did it.

“But you don’t seem to want that further enquiry.”

There isn’t any “further enquiry” on the naturalistic and evolutionist side. Not on the question I posed. I checked with Tomasello who refused to answer, so far.

That’s why it’s only on the Atheist (including Methodologically Atheist) side that the gradual emergence of language isn’t disproven, because in that ideology, naturalism as such isn’t vulnerable to disproof.

Joseph Foster

“In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth.” may or may not be “true”. It is not a scientific theory or explanation.

Hans-Georg Lundahl

If it is factually true, it is an explanation, and specifically ruling it out as an explanation in “science” means wedding that “science” to the ideology of Methodological Atheism.

You have stated it. You haven’t argued it. And you most definitely have not shown it could conceivably account for the difference between human and ape communication with the added assumption of man developing from an ape creature, ancestral to both man and chimp.

Perhaps your memory is becoming somewhat short. Here is the actual problem you are skitting away from:

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.

As you are a linguist, none of the terms should need any explanation. And if you had missed the problem, you’d probably have answered with some answer to a different one.

30.XII.2025

Joseph Foster

If it is factually true, it is an explanation,…

There is no evidence that it is factually true and considerable other evidence to suggest that it is not. It was apparently a just-so story, a folk explanation for there being different languages. It appears to be taken explanatorily seriously only by people committed to a position of biblical historical [and general] inerrancy.

Perhaps your memory is becoming somewhat short. Here is the actual problem you are skitting away from:

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.

Nope. It’s your manufactured problem. You seem to think you have a clever “gotcha”.

And as to your “As you are a linguist, none of the terms should need any explanation.”

They probably shouldn’t, but they apparently do. For one, I don’t know exactly what you mean by “notional”. Notional is not generally a currently used technical term in Linguistics. It has been used in reference to grammars or parts of grammars that try to define categories like noun, verb, subject, …. in terms of extra-linguistic categories. So a noun is “the name of a person, place, or thing.” The term notional in this use is in opposition to formal.

Even that apparent dicchotomy turns out to be a little fuzzy. In “notional grammars”, the subject of a sentence was characterized as “the noun or pronoun that represents what the sentence is about.”

That’s sort of notional but also refers to sentence-internal linguistic categories. It’s also of course demonstrably just wrong. In the sentence

It’s cold.

only an idiot would argue that the sentence is about the pronoun It. But cold isn’t a noun or a pronoun here. It’s an adjective. Some tried to claim, without a shred of supporting evidence whatever, that it has an antecedent and the antecedent is, well, the weather, the temperature, …..

That is, they’re grasping at straws clingingly desperately to their “notional” grammatical categories. As you appear to be clinging to your God-gave-Man-Language and the Genesis creation story. We have no need of that hypothesis.

Now to your ape calls ~ human language morpheme ~ phoneme stuff. I am not on top of the latest research on bonobo, chimpanzee, or other non-human primate communication. But I’m not sure that the terms morpheme [also shown in recent linguistic research to be maybe a little fuzzy], and phoneme even apply to their calls.

Human spoken language is non-discreet in the speech stream. The more sensitive the spectrograph, the more one sound appears to shade into the next following or be shaded into by the next preceding. But all languages can be represented with alphabetic writing. Alphabetic writing operates as though the sounds of the speech stream are discrete.

Horse whinnies, whippoorwill calls, and the like cannot be represented very closely with alphabetic writing. Not even with the IPA [International Phonetic Alphabet].

Language is a special kind of symboling. In symboling, humans conventionally use something to represent something else. In language there is at least a dual organiztion: Individual phonemes in general do not really represent some extralinguistic thing or in principle do they have assigned to them a language-internal function. That doesn’t mean that there are not morphemes that have only one phoneme; there of course are, in many languages. But those monophonemic morphemes are usually affixes, or vowel ellipted forms, as in French l’aubergine ‘the eggplant’. But in general, a morpheme consists of a string of one or more phonemes (whether taxonomic or systematic doesn’t matter here) and none of which taken individually has any “meaning” nor contributes an analytically identifiable part of the meaning of the entire morpheme.

So we have {house/Haus} and {mouse/Maus}. Two morphemes in English / German with nearly identical “meanings”, or referent classes. But the initial phonemes, /h/ and /m/ do not in any way contribute any part of the meaning to |haus/Haus| or to |mouse/Maus|. And with German it’s even worse~better, because you have also {aus}. The [aus} of these three German and two English words has as a group nor individually any identifiable “meaning’ contribution to the meanings of {house/Haus, mouse / Maus, aus/. Nor has the [aw] any identifiable contribution to the overall meaning of the English word {out} /awt/, the cognate of German aus.

But because of this dual phonological | morphological level of organization, languages can take a relatively small finite number of sounds and combined them into forms that are symbols and, taken as a string, represent about anything we want them to.

You may actually construe that as even more supporting evidence that “God did it.”. And indeed, it is possible, at least conceivable that He/They may have. But it doesn’t address how. The “God-hypothesis” doesn’t help us understand how. It is a possible, though invulnerable to disproof, answer to the question Wer? or Was? ‘Who? or What? It does not answer Wie? / How?.

That we don’t know. We’re working on it. Or trying to.

Hans-Georg Lundahl

"There is no evidence that it is factually true and considerable other evidence to suggest that it is not."

Possibilities: Genesis 1 and 2 or something like it is true. Man is eternal in an eternal universe. Or language doesn't exist, because it would not have evolved.

"It was apparently a just-so story, a folk explanation for there being different languages."

You are confusing the subthreads. This is your position on Genesis 11. This one is on the main issue, creation of language as such, Genesis 1 and 2.

"It appears to be taken explanatorily seriously only by people committed to a position of biblical historical [and general] inerrancy."

I certainly am committed to Biblical inerrancy, not least historical. Knowing Tabitha means Dorcas and a woman in Joppe was referred to by both names, or that Joppe and Lydda are close may not be neessary to save my soul, but once I know Acts 9 says so, I am dedicated to this being so.

"Nope. It’s your manufactured problem. You seem to think you have a clever “gotcha”."

My "manufactured problem" is stating facts as they are.

"For one, I don’t know exactly what you mean by “notional”."

"I ate chicken" is notional. "Thank you!" is another speach function, social interaction or whatever. It borrows its expression from the notional statement meaning "I am in the process of thanking you" ....

In "ape" it is perfectly possible to say "thank you" but it wouldn't involve two morphemes, or ellipsis suggesting a third of them. And the morpheme wouldn't be divided into phonemes. It needn't be, since the main type of communication is pragmatic ("let's ...") or emotive (insert any smiley for equivalent) and a "language" consisting only of the equivalent of traffic signs and smileys doesn't need so many expressions that subdividing sentences into different morphemes or morphemes into different phonemes pays.

"In the sentence // It’s cold. // only an idiot would argue that the sentence is about the pronoun It"

Only an idiot would pretend that "it's cold" or "it's raining" is the typical sentence expression, the reason why grammar has the category of subject. If you want examples of the real stuff, I suggest "all dogs are mammals" or "the little boy in the corner is crying."

"But I’m not sure that the terms morpheme [also shown in recent linguistic research to be maybe a little fuzzy], and phoneme even apply to their calls."

That's exactly my point. The problem is how to get from pragmatic emotica to notional language and from non-morpheme / non-phoneme to discrete mind bytes of phonemes making morphemes and morphemes making sentences.

"The more sensitive the spectrograph, the more one sound appears to shade into the next following or be shaded into by the next preceding."

Because the spectrograph isn't a mind. It only catches all of the physical sound, not what makes this a "p" or what makes that an "eye" or both of them together a "pie."

"In language there is at least a dual organization:"

Yes. Thank you for making my point.

"But because of this dual phonological | morphological level of organization, languages can take a relatively small finite number of sounds and combined them into forms that are symbols and, taken as a string, represent about anything we want them to."

Precisely what Australopithecus definitely couldn't. And you take that creature to be our ancestor and no God to have interfered in the transition.

"You may actually construe that as even more supporting evidence that “God did it.”."

Thank you, that is not "even more" it's just a restating of what I already did say was evidence of Genesis 1 and 2 (11 being a different thing entirely, depending on history rather than philosophy).

"the question Wer? or Was? ‘Who? or What? It does not answer Wie? / How?."

Well, God as answer to the who means omnipotence answers the how. Because no natural explanation could.

"That we don’t know. We’re working on it. Or trying to."

Tomasello didn't show that, when I tried to consult him on it.

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.

Joseph Foster

Right.

That was the night they were frightened by flying pigs.

29.XII.2025

Hans-Georg Lundahl

Or it was the night before the morning when in sign language different groups of workers decided to leave each other and bury Göbekli Tepe in sand.

Like, a writing system being the same does not necessarily mean speech is the same (confer English and German having comparable spelling systems), and a writing system being different doesn’t necessarily mean the speech is different (confer Serbian being spelled in Latin and Cyrillic characters). But a writing system being the same goes in the direction of a shared language.

Carbon dates earlier than Göbekli Tepe, what we find reminiscent of written language are 32 symbols dug up by Genevieve von Petzinger, the same ones from Spain to Indonesia. The hashtag is one of them.

Carbon dates later than Göbekli Tepe, we see rise of comparably very localised writing systems (like the Vinča symbols).

Or one of the nights close to the birth of Peleg, as recorded by those keeping the records of Genesis 11 and Genesis 10 (later put into their now specific order by Moses).

These two alternatives to your somewhat amusing theory are not mutually exclusive.

Joseph Foster

“..a writing system being the same goes in the direction of a shared language.”

No, not necessarily. The first known and datable example of written Rumanian was in 1521 and is in Cyrillic writing. Rumanian was generally written with the Cyrillic alphabet until the early 1860s, was in Moldova until into the 1990’s, and still is in Transnistria. But it’s a Romance, i.e. Italic Branch, language, not a Slavic Branch one, to cite just one of many counterexamples. To take another of completely different language families, the Cherokee syllabary has a number of graphic symbols that resemble letters from the English / French alphabet. But those are alphabets and the Cherokee writing is a syllabary and Cherokee is a very very different language from English or from French. And the latter two are Indoeuropean, different major branches, while Cherokee is in the Iroquoian Language Family.

You might see von Petzinger’s “signs” as “reminiscent” of “written language” but I don’t. You might want to find some reviews of her First Signs:….

But writing really has nothing to do with this. That there is a Semitic Family (and an AfroAsiatic family of which Semitic is a branch) of Languages is helped by some early writing. It is/was not determined to be true by it. It was determine by the methods of historical-comparative Linguistics.

Here’s a link to a relatively short pithy article you might find interesting:

Pseudoscientific language comparison - Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudoscientific_language_comparison

Hans-Georg Lundahl

Have you heard of the fallacy known as strawman?

“No, not necessarily. The first known and datable example of written Rumanian was in 1521 and is in Cyrillic writing.”

A perfect answer if I had said “a shared writing system always automatically means a shared language” …

Which I specifically had ruled out. I had even given another example of a language written both in Latin and in Cyrillic, i e Serbian.

Now, not only is this a strawman, but it’s a very late exemple in a society where both Cyrillic and Latin came from the outside. I e, through translanguage communications. How many translanguage communications would there have been in a palaeolithic society, all the way from Spain to Indonesia?

“You might want to find some reviews of her First Signs:….”

I have indeed not read that work. I do note that 32 signs looks like a phoneme inventory.

“It was determine by the methods of historical-comparative Linguistics.”

In other words, reconstruction. That means basically “educated guess” and a guess ceases to be educated when it leaves out records (such as Genesis 11) which would give another bearing on the linguistic facts.

Take Quenya and Sindarin, both go back to 1930’s and updates 1950’s and there never was a time when their ancestral Proto-Eldarin was spoken at Cuivienen before the First Age of the Sun.

Even so, they are related in ways predictable by that method, because Tolkien knew it. Somehow God is supposed to not have known it?

Joseph Foster

You wrote “goes in the direction of a shared language”, whatever that is supposed to mean.

Reconstruction of a theoretically retrodicted Proto-Language is not an “educated guess” and it is not the same thing as discovering a language family and determining which languages are members of it. The second isn’t a “guess” either. Many laypeople think of a theory as a “guess” or even a “speculation” but that’s not what a theory is. Language family discovery and member determination is done on the basis primarily of regular systematic sound correspondences. It, or a good deal of it, has to be done before reconstruction of the ancestor common language can be seriously attempted but they are separate tasks.

Hebrew did not emerge as a separate language from the Common Canaanite Semitic group of dialects much before 1100 - 1000 BC. It could not have been the “first” language or eldest Semitic language.

Genesis 11 gives no “bearing” whatever on any known linguistic “facts” or data that I am aware of. Nor I suspect that you are aware of.

And how you get a “phoneme” inventory out of those “32 signs [her term] is beyond me unless you are assuming they represent sound segments of a language, in which case 32 is within the typical alphabet range and a bit shy of what we’d normally expect for a syllabary. They might conceivably be logographs. But there’s precious little evidence that they are even what is sometimes called Proto-Writing.

And

He actually ended

with this "And" hanging lose.

Hans-Georg Lundahl

Proto-Writing, not being deciphered, cannot be excluded from being “within the typical alphabet range” by being precisely alphabets and that’s why I think 32 symbols is important.

“Hebrew did not emerge as a separate language from the Common Canaanite Semitic group of dialects much before 1100 - 1000 BC. It could not have been the “first” language or eldest Semitic language.”

If you mean “Hebrew as we know it” … Peleg could have remained a speaker of sth closer to Proto-Sinaitic than to Biblical Hebrew.

I’m fairly sure even Proto-Sinaitic was sufficiently distinct from Akkadian or Gheez. Or probably even Aramaic.

"You wrote “goes in the direction of a shared language”, whatever that is supposed to mean."

That of two symptoms available, the one after Göbekli Tepe is more probably related to language diversity and the one before Göbekli Tepe to language unity.

In the direction of can be considered as synonym for “more probable than otherwise it would otherwise be” …

"Reconstruction of a theoretically retrodicted Proto-Language is not an “educated guess” "

It certainly is. For instance it involves the assumption that the languages share an actual ancestral one.

“Genesis 11 gives no “bearing” whatever on any known linguistic “facts” or data that I am aware of.”

Like Old Egyptian and Elamite and Sumerian being entirely different languages in Abraham’s time, 1000 years after the Flood? No one is even offering the guess that these belong to the same language family.

But you might of course not recognise the Flood happened, history denier there!

30.XII.2025

Joseph Foster

I mean a Northwest Semitic Canaanite language we can identify as (early) Hebrew. And I do not know what you mean by “Proto-Sinaitic”. I don’t think that comparative Semitic linguists identify a Sinaitic Branch. I might have missed something. Perhaps your reference is geographic?

********
Mine you quoted: Reconstruction of a theoretically retrodicted Proto-Language is not an “educated guess”

Your comment: “It certainly is. For instance it involves the assumption that the languages share an actual ancestral one.”

It’s not really. As to the reconstruction itself, it’s a motivated approximation. At that point, we take it that there was a particular shared ancestor language. But as I pointed out, that’s a later stage, and entering that activity, the shared ancestor language is not an assumption. It’s a theoretically postulated explanation of the data.

Actually, a shared ancestor language is almost never an “assumption” in Historical-Comparative Linguistics. It’s more apt to be a “discovery”.

Languages generally differ randomly in the actual strings of sounds they use for “words”, for affixes, and the like. Or in tonal languages, the tones they use as a part of the lexical word’s phonological make up. So when we find a set of two or more languages that either have the same sounds for given words or affixes, or else, more commonly, regular and patterned differences in sounds for the same words or affixes, that is unusual and wants an explanation. Loanwords from one to another is of course a possibility but there are ways to check for that and if we eliminate borrowing as an explanation, then the only thing left is that they each underwent separate sound change development from a common ancestor language.

We do not start with the assumption that two or more given languages share a common ancestor. If anything, we start with the assumption that they do not. In some, actually a fair number, of instances, the languages in question are close enough that we have an initial hunch that they are related. The Romance languages are a case in point, and of course there is a lot of extralinguistic historical information too. But a number of the Algonquian languages of North America were close enough and with differing degrees of mutual intelligibility that it was “hunched”, or “assume” if you like, that they were somehow related. Leonard Bloomfield, and others, worked out how and found the regular sound correspondences that led to the theoretical positing of Proto-Algonquian, or in Bloomfield’s case, Proto-Central Alqonquian. But later on a few other languages were also shown to be Algonquian.

There’s an interesting case, actually several, in the development of the Indoeuropean Family theory. In much of the 19th century, there were competent comparative-historical linguists who doubted that the Celtic languages were Indoeuropean. They were eventually however found to be. When Hittite was deciphered, it was found to be either a daughter language of Proto-IE, or else one (along with Luwan and a few others) in a “sister” of PIE, so for a time an even older common prehistoric ancestor language family Indo-Hittite or Indo-Anatolian was seriously considered.
*****
My comment: “Genesis 11 gives no “bearing” whatever on any known linguistic “facts” or data that I am aware of.”

Your comment: “Like Old Egyptian and Elamite and Sumerian being entirely different languages in Abraham’s time, 1000 years after the Flood? No one is even offering the guess that these belong to the same language family.”

Sumerian certainly wasn’t. So far as we know, it’s / was a linguistic isolate. Not know or seriously thought to (have) be(en) related to any other language or language family of its time. I don’t think I follow you there. Maybe the problem is

a. “the” flood, by which I take it you mean Noah’s Great Universal Flood
b. the time depth. I take it you take them as having all been one and the same language at the time of the NGF and having had only a millennium to diverge. I don’t. Nor does any scholar or scientist I take seriously.

But you might of course not recognise the Flood happened, history denier there!i

I not only don’t “recognize” it, I think it didn’t happen. Oh, there could very well have been and probably were in the Mesopotamian as wall as some other areas local significant floods, some of them catastrophic. But so far as I know there is no geological evidence of a Great Universal World Wide flood, as per Noah.

Hans-Georg Lundahl

“Perhaps your reference is geographic?”

Alphabetic. The alphabet found on Sinai that looks like Hieroglyphs, as an alphabet is called Proto-Sinaitic, but the language is apparently called Proto-Canaanite as I found on the article Proto-Sinaitic script.

“It’s a theoretically postulated explanation of the data.”

If it weren’t theoretically postulated and if it weren’t an explanation of data, the guess wouldn’t be educated.

To give you a little taste of why it’s still a guess, feat. PIE:

1) Along the three to four laryngeal reconstruction commonly shown in etymologies, one Finn named Jouna Pyysalo has made a mono-laryngeal reconstruction;
2) Trubetskoy has suggested a Sprachbund, and while this is met with objections like no way Sanskrit in India could have areal features with Old Irish in Ireland, well, the common ancestor hypothesis also excludes the original extention being all that large, same problem for both hypotheses;
3) along the common assumption of PIE spreading Westward, one Alberto on the site Ancient DNA era has argued Chorded Ware spread sth like Basque, not IE, and Andronovo when spreading South took over an older culture where cremation was already the custom: Origins and spread of Indo-European languages: an alternative view – Ancient DNA Era

In other words, a thing postulated as explanation can be a guess. No one is presumably disputing that PIE in the Kurgan culture was an explanation.

“So when we find a set of two or more languages that either have the same sounds for given words or affixes, or else, more commonly, regular and patterned differences in sounds for the same words or affixes, that is unusual and wants an explanation”

I am very well aware of the methodology, thank you very much. I also think it very likely Germanic, Balto-Slavic, Italo-Celtic each descends from an ancestral language, Italo-Celtic possibly sharing one with Germanic.

What you do not adress is the quantity. Russian and English don’t share 70% of the etymological word roots, they don’t share 50, they share only c. 25 %. Meanwhile, Persian and Arabic share about 33 %. No one suggests they descend from a common ancestor.

As to excluding loan words, there is no problem in excluding recent loan words. In Swedish, I regularly use French spelling for our loan words from French. But what about words borrowed around the time of suggested earlier divergences? It seems “star” is a pretty pan-IE loan from Ishtar, and yet it follows IE divergences of phonetics in respectively Germanic and Italic and Greek.

However, for Afro-Asiatic, I’m not suggesting a Sprachbund, I don’t think there would have been time for it in the c. 600 years separating Babel from the time when Abraham left the areas of Akkadian and arrived in an area of Old Egyptian. I’m suggesting God, at the miracle of Babel, showed the kind of awareness of what descent from a proto-language would look like that Tolkien did in the 1930’s to 50’s. With obviously infinitely more attention to detail and usefulness as human communication (don’t think one could live a daily life, even as a historic reenactor, on Quenya basis).

“Sumerian certainly wasn’t. So far as we know, it’s / was a linguistic isolate. Not know or seriously thought to (have) be(en) related to any other language or language family of its time.”

You seem to have some trouble following me. My point is, on Merritt Ruhlen’s view, Sumerian and Old Egyptian could have a common ancestor 40 000 years ago. They certainly couldn’t have that in 600 years since Babel or 1000 years since the Flood, when Abraham left areas of Akkadian and Sumerian to areas of Canaanite and Old Egyptian.

“I take it you take them as having all been one and the same language at the time of the NGF and having had only a millennium to diverge. I don’t. Nor does any scholar or scientist I take seriously.”

Indeed. And that’s where I have trouble taking you seriously. Because Theologians that I take seriously do.

“I not only don’t “recognize” it, I think it didn’t happen.”

Would you mind telling me the exact notional difference?

“local significant floods, some of them catastrophic.”

Those wouldn’t fit the Ark, on naval reasons. A wooden vessel (not sure if ship is appropriate) cannot be that large on shallow water. They also wouldn’t fit the timelines of Genesis 5 and 11, among other things on carbon dating reasons.

Joseph Foster

Re the Sinaitic early alphabet(s), OK. Wondered if that might be what you had in mind.

You and I use the term guess in not entirely the same way. I’ve already suggested other terms for what at least I have been talking about and won’t repeat myself. Yes, there are sometimes different and at least partially competing explanatory theories That’s how science works.

Great time depth can lead to lexical replacement, often by a given language’s internal changes of meaning, or Bedeutungswandel. English town and German Zaun are true cognates, but no longer the same core or absolute meaning. One is |fence, wall, border| and the other is | group of dwellings and shops|, i.e. the settlement enclosed by the fence or wall. So languages long separated from their common ancestor may not have a huge %age of cognates. We don’t determine language family membership on the basis of percentage of source language vocabulary. Albanian was a case where discovering whether and determining that it is Indoeuropean took quite a while.

Again I agree with your point, though not necessarily with your star ~ Ishtar example. That’s actually etymologically problematic. It might have been a loan from early Semitic; or the lending might have gone the other way — into Semitic from IE. Or a coincidental resemblance.

And you’re right about very early loanwords: if they came into the ancestor proto-/common language before the sound changes, they are likely to have undergone them too. One of the reasons why historical-comparative methodology can only take us back so far. In this respect you’re very likely aware that Ruhlen is, or was, something of an outlier.

I have no position re a possible AfroAsiatic Sprachbund but find your reasoning or grounds for rejecting the possibility odd, even bizarre. I don’t regard a timeline between those legendary or mythological biblical events as having any bearing on the issue. And the “miracle” of Babel is simply not an event at all except as a made-up just-so story. Nothing to hang rejection or acceptance of a linguistic theory on.

Re the difference between not recognize and think did not happen’,
—In my dialects of English recognize implies there is or was actually something there. I can’t “recognize” the Noahnic Universal Flood because I think, for lack of evidence apart from Genesis, that it didn’t happen. There was no recognizeable there there.

“I take it you take them as having all been one and the same language at the time of the NGF and having had only a millennium to diverge. I don’t. Nor does any scholar or scientist I take seriously.”

Your reply: “Indeed. And that’s where I have trouble taking you seriously. Because Theologians that I take seriously do.”

That’s a big and maybe the big difference between you and me. I don’t generally care whether theologians care about my Linguistics because most of them don’t know much, if at all, about it. [Some do know some ancient languages but that’s not Linguistics.] You apparently know more Linguistics than most theologians I’ve encountered or read but you apparently let your Linguistics be guided, directed, or limited by theological considerations and the approval of, selected, theologians.

I don’t. And if I did, we probably wouldn’t necessarily select the same theologians, though we might overlap a bit. You’ve referred a couple of times here or elsewhere to something you call, I believe, “Methodological Atheism”.

I’d call it Methodological / Scientific Agnosticism. Adduction of “God” is simply in most, possibly all, instances in doing scientific or, nowdays even historical /prehistoric, investigation simply invulnerable to disproof. It’s not even a hypothesis because we know of no way to check it and find out that it’s wrong. It’s a convenient adduction for those who deeply desire finality, and especially a personal finality. But science requires some tolerance for infinality.

So I think we’ve exhausted this and you probably have other things to do — I know I have. I think I may owe you another response, at least a consideration, of another reply on a different subthread. I’ll read that most recent comment of yours and reply if I have anything I think worth adding or altering.

31.XII.2025

Hans-Georg Lundahl

And you’re right about very early loanwords: if they came into the ancestor proto-/common language before the sound changes, they are likely to have undergone them too.

Which is why a very early Sprachbund (probably followed up by more of them) cannot be excluded.

By the way, the possibility of Semantic shift would hardly account for the 75 % non-etyma between English and Russian.

“In this respect you’re very likely aware that Ruhlen is, or was, something of an outlier.”

Indeed, hence my exaggeration that “no one” suggests Sumerian and Akkadian had a common ancestor, meaning no one dealing with Proto-Languages that are longer than 27 or 32 words, as his Proto-World is.

“I don’t regard a timeline between those legendary or mythological biblical events as having any bearing on the issue.”

In other words, you are a history denier.

“—In my dialects of English recognize implies there is or was actually something there.”

Our usage agrees. Since I think there is something to recognise, that’s the word I chose.

“I’d call it Methodological / Scientific Agnosticism. Adduction of “God” is simply in most, possibly all, instances in doing scientific or, nowdays even historical /prehistoric, investigation simply invulnerable to disproof.”

Is it amenable to proof? Is the alternative vulnerable to disproof or even actually disproven?

Or does it depend on paradigm, in such a way that your stance makes any naturalistic alternative invulnerable to disproof?

If the supernatural is excluded, there are lots of historic sources that get smudged, not just Genesis 11.

“It’s not even a hypothesis because we know of no way to check it and find out that it’s wrong.”

Do you know a way of checking and finding out if it’s wrong that the sky (on a clear day) is blue?

And is there a way of checking that the alternative (“mythology is made up just so stories”) is wrong?

Excuse me if I overtax your patience with a subject you find exhausted.

Paolo Coelho ? Não, Obrigado

@rebeccasmiff
Everyone Loves this Book...Except Me
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/WbnsqZ4LxOE

Is The Alchemist by Coelho?

Bc, yes, it is that by the way, he lost me over saying, in The Fifth Mountain, that Elias pretended to be a Baal worshipper in Phoenicia.