Orgin of Lanuage

First of all, any time I see the words "sophisticated statistical methods" I get skeptical.

Since the last paragraph tainted the rest, I'm just going to say interesting theory, but theories are made to be disproven.

However, we do know that all languages began with just one. How God divided them at Babel, *we* don't know.

 

First of all, this researcher is not a linguist. His Ph. D. is in psychology! And he's done research in evolution. So he is completely unqualified to research languages.

Secondly, he chose phonemes, the wrong element of language to research! A phoneme is simply a sound, a basic sound of a particular language. What he should have researched is morpheme. A morpheme is the shortest sound with actual meaning in a language. So for example, in English "eh" is a phoneme, but has no meaning. But "-ed" is a morpheme, a sound with meaning. His research on phonemes is meaningless in his study of 500 languages. It reveals nothing like what he wants it to reveal.

Thirdly, linguists know that languages exist in familes: Indo-European (English, French, Sanskrit etc.), Afro-Asiatic, Altaic, etc. (Japanese is in a class by itself. There are no other similar languages to form a family.) So for example, there is absolutely no similarity between Chinese and Celtic that would indicate a common origin, the thing evolutionist researcher Quentin Atkinson was trying to prove according to this article.

Finally, since the linguistic data reveals various language families, completely unconnected in their origins, the Babel account in the Bible is very believable. The various languages did not evolve, they were created by God. I fully believe that the source languages that developed into modern language families are what God created when He divided the languages at Babel.

 

Just as I said, linguists find this research to be very dubious. Here is a quote from one article:

From: http://www.nature.com/news/2008/080521/full/453446a.html