... on Linguistic Creationism

Q

Is there a name for the linguistic equivalent of creationism?
https://www.quora.com/Is-there-a-name-for-the-linguistic-equivalent-of-creationism/answer/Hans-Georg-Lundahl

Quora Question Details Bot

Aug 8, 2017

We all know about the creation/evolution "debate". Creationists believe that the world was created as is, by God, because Genesis says so.

But Genesis also says that various languages were created by God, at the tower of Babel.

This seems to get a lot less space on the Internet, but has similar issues

Hans-Georg Lundahl

1m ago

“But Genesis also says that various languages were created by God, at the tower of Babel.”

As Creationists also believe this, this is simply part of Creationism.

Hans-Georg Lundahl

Studied religions as curious parallels and contrasts to Xtian faith since 9, 10?

Answered 1m ago

There is no one linguistic equivalent of creationism.

If you though creationism means fixity of species and linguistics involved some believing a fixity of languages, that would be naive linguistics and misrepresenting creationism.

As to Tower of Babel, creationists do not pretend all 6000 languages and or dialects arrived fullfeathered thousands of years ago, and in some countries French and English replaced Latin by Conquest. We do believe more than one language and mutually incomprehensible ones were spoken directly after Babel, and then language has evolved some.

Or languages have. The singular would mean the evolution of languages were a kind of evolution of language as such, which it is not.

Speciation has also occurred several times over since the Ark, we now have 16 to 25 species of hedgehogs (depending on whether moonrats count or not). On the Ark, there was one couple.

As to my personal theory on whether PIE languages rather come from a Sprachbund than from a Proto-Language, that has been argued by Trubetskoy, independently of any creationist motivation.

The big problem with PIE for a Creationist is, IE languages correspond to more than one of the grandsons of Noah in table of languages. So, say PIE was originally spoken by someone like tribe of Gomer, what happened to the language of Iavan (Greeks) or Madai (Medes)? If on the other hand there really was such a displacement, and you could argue it from PIE being a good reconstruction, why is Nostratic not also one (if you consistently prefer Proto-Language over Sprachbund) and an even older such, since Finnish and Esquimaux shares traits with IE languages.

But there are creationists who do not agree on this point, and if naive conclusions from Tower of Babel were what you were thinking of, you were talking about a counterpart to a naive creationism - which is obviously still less wrong than evolutionism.