Print This ArticleAccording to what we’ve been taught in school, man started his communication by pointing at things and grunting, then developed different grunts for different things, and then spontaneously developed a single language about 50,000 years ago, full of syntax and verbs and nouns, and then went on to develop different languages such as Sanskrit and Akkadian, Chinese and Hebrew.
To date there is no indication of why we were able to spontaneously go from having ape-like grunts to Shakespeare-like prose. As one scholar frankly admits “we simply don’t know how language originated. We suspect that some type of spoken language developed between 100,000 and 50,000 years ago.” (The Study Of Language, George Yule)
Bottom line, no one knows and everyone disagrees about exactly what happened. All we know is that apes can’t speak and we can. But the general assumption, in keeping with the theory of evolution, is that one ape said “ouch” involuntarily when he bit his finger and so when a baby went to put his finger in his mouth, the mother would point at the finger and point at the mouth and say “ouch!” to warn that pain would result from biting the finger. Thus the word “ouch” meaning “pain” entered the language.
Then words that mimicked animal sounds like “woof!” became the word for dog. This is a rather brutal generalization but you get the idea. Gradually this built up to a more complex language with more abstract ideas. But this is the OPPOSITE of what FACT tells us!…
The only facts we have to go on are the ancient forms of writing, such as Sanskrit and Egyptian. And when we look at them, according to the theory of linguistic evolution just outlined, we SHOULD find simpler languages that gradually became more complicated as history progressed. But we find the exact opposite! We find massively complex languages – ones more difficult to learn and understand than any we use today.
For example, the concept of capital letters, having spaces between words, separating sentences, and using punctuation as we know it was largely invented in Rome after 100 BC. More ancient languages like Hebrew, Greek, Sanskrit, Egyptian, Akkadian, you name it – were written as one solid block of text – SOMETHINGLIKEAWHOLEPAGEOFTHIS.
Of course, that really isn’t strictly true either, for many ancient languages had word liaisons – meaning that when you put words like, say, “the” and “cat” together, you don’t get “THECAT” but rather “THKAT”. The K represents the union of E and C. Then most languages had special cases, not only for verbs, but for nouns as well, so that verbs, nouns, and adjectives all changed to keep gender, plural, and case correct.
For ancient Greek for instance, each verb can appear in over 200 forms! It’s as if the verb “To have” appeared not only as “have”, “has”, and “had”, but hab, haven, hast… etc, in over TWO HUNDRED different ways! Nouns also changed, each having many dozens of forms depending on usage, plurality, masculinity, and so on. So practically every word could appear dozens or even hundreds of different ways, depending on usage! And Greek was simpler than Sanskrit or Sumerian!
The point is, that in these languages, the farther back in time we go, the more complex they get! The HARDER to learn and read they become. Sumerian was much more difficult to read and write than its successor language Akkadian, which in turn was much more complicated than it’s own successor, Aramaic. Over time we see an endless pattern of ever-increasing simplicity in world languages leading towards today. No language on Earth today is as complicated as the ancient languages of 4,000 years ago.
It required most of a lifetime JUST to learn to read and write Sumerian and Akkadian or Chinese. And it has been a steady downhill spiral of simplification ever since. Spanish is simpler than Latin. Modern Greek is easier than Ancient Greek.
But what language of grunts could have ever formed the complex assemblage of grammar that is Sanskrit? When every fact we can point to shows the destruction of that same grammar in favor of flexibility, ease of learning, and portability?
As we peer into the most ancient historical texts we find that a single very complex language once existed that has been subjected to ever increasing entropy since God scattered it at the tower of Babel (Genesis 11:9). Not a simple language of grunts that spontaneously, for no reason, grew to incredibly complex, beautifully flowing languages like Sanskrit, and then degenerated into the relatively simple languages we speak today.
Every evidence points to the conclusion that mankind all spoke a single language once. Most scholars accept that there was once a single global language spoken by all mankind. That is the only way to explain similarities between English and Sanskrit, and between Chinese and Greek. Where that language came from, only the Bible can offer a rational explanation.
