The Language of Paradise

The tongue-in-cheekness of last year's April 1 Miniature (on the Tower of Babel, No. 61) could lead us to overlook a serious, important point. Let's start the new year by recalling two questions it touches on:
(1) The purpose of the story seems to be accounting for how peoples fell out of understanding of each other, resulting in the diversity of languages we all see around us. Is this idea widespread around the world, and are there correspondingly varying means of explaining it?
(2) The Tower of Babel myth is based not only on the conviction that all mankind originally spoke one language, but that this language was 'perfect', in the sense that the names of objects reflect their true nature, are in some sense revelations of their essence. Do other cultures share this same conviction about the 'original' language (perhaps most faithfully reflected in their own)?

In Genesis 11:1-9, the Old Testament offers an answer to the first in the Tower of Babel story, which recounts God's punishment of mankind with the curse of diversity of languages. The second is answered in Genesis 2:19, where God brings all things to Adam to see what he will call them, and "whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name."

Let's undertake a little expedition through a few cultures around the world, to see how they handle these questions. Taking question (1) first, we see that many accounts agree with the Old Testament that language diversity is a divine punishment, or is at least the result of something unfavorable:
In Australia, one of the indigenous tribes tells the story of ancestral people eating an old person. The tribes that ate the flesh spoke a 'clear' language, but those who ate the internal organs spoke an 'unclear' one.
The Kabyle in Africa recount that people started speaking different languages following an argument between people.
A tribe in Assam tells that languages became confused when three children once chased a rat.
A tribe in the Amazon holds that the god divided peoples, creating disunity (and mutually unintelligible languages) so that they would obey him.
Among Native American languages, the Maidu (California) say that people originally had one language but they began to speak in various ways at a funeral ceremony. The Iroquois believe that the separation of languages resulted from a family quarrel that resulted in the killing of a child.

But the idea that the observed diversity of languages is a curse is not as widespread as we might assume. Many stories around the world simply account for diversity as a natural fact:
In ancient India, the sacred hymn known as the Rig Veda at one point has Vac ('speech') saying that the gods have broken him up and that he possesses many forms.
A people in the Indo-China peninsula speaks of sixty races of people, each with its own language, creeping from a squash.
The Quiché‚ (Guatemala) tell how people lived together speaking one language, until each group chose a god of its own and went off speaking its own language.
The Navajo in the American Southwest have an elaborate creation myth involving, at one point, 'Changing Woman' and the emergence of peoples into the visible world. When they spoke, they were speaking her language. But she also created the neighboring Pueblos, Mexicans and others who began speaking different languages, dispatching them in various directions.
In Islam, the Koran teaches that Adam did not invent names of everything, but was taught them by Allah. The diversity we see is a natural event, a sign of Allah's power. All peoples are able to understand the revelation of the Koran in whatever language it is expressed.

Many peoples possess a mythological system that does not include any attempt to account for the diversity of languages, which is often simply taken for granted. They make no attempt to answer our question (1).

But practically all cultures around the world focus on the idea of a 'perfect' language, our question (2). Recall the Australian tribe mentioned a few paragraphs back that thought of some people (the flesh-eaters) speaking a 'clear' language - one in which words represented the true nature of things. For the ancient Egyptians, the god Ptah proclaimed the names of all things, making language a gift of the gods. In China, mythical emperors taught the 'right' speech. The Koran sees diversity as the natural fragmentation of the one unique language in which all others are already contained.

Peoples everywhere look for ways to discover the matching of name and thing. It seems to be a universal human thought that either one's own language uses the 'natural' words for everything, or there must have been a 'perfect' language in the past. This second leads to the endeavor we find everywhere to search out some revelation of truth and harmony in the world. It looks as if there is a human consciousness that language is somehow related to the complexity of the physical world and human existence.

This brings us to the question first subjected to searching exploration in Plato's dialog Cratylus and vigorously debated ever since: do our words for everything arise in some mysterious way by nature out of their essence (as it feels to the speakers of any language), or is the connection between name and thing based on convention, in other words arbitrary? We'll have to come back to this question in a future Miniature.