The Tongues of Man

BY “AWAKE!” CORRESPONDENT IN LAOS

HOW much mankind is divided by speaking different tongues! About 3,000 spoken languages have been counted by scholars.a If all the dialects (local forms of a language) were added to the above figure, it would probably be much higher. But, then, even experts disagree in some cases about what is a separate language and what is simply a dialect. Why? Because, even when people speak what are called dialects of the same language, they may be unable to understand one another.

Yet at one time all humans spoke the same language. Jehovah God, the Creator of man, himself originated different languages for the purpose of restricting human cooperation for a wrong purpose. His action brought to an end the building of the God-dishonoring Tower of Babel and obliged its builders to disperse throughout the earth.​—Gen. 11:1-9.

Most languages can be grouped together into a mere ten or so language families (here, again, different authorities give different numbers). All the languages in the same family are offshoots of one ancient parent language, and, in many cases, that parent language has died out.

Many persons know that French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and several other languages are all modern varieties of Latin greatly changed. Not so many are aware that even Latin is classified as being only a member of a language family. Along with many other languages of Europe and India, it is said to have sprung from a lost ancestor called Indo-European.

We do not know just how many parent languages Jehovah brought into existence at Babel because it does not seem that some tongues, like Japanese and Basque, can be fitted into any known family, and many other languages have vanished. Possibly there were relatively few parent tongues. In time, people speaking the same language separated and had no contact with one another for centuries, so their speech habits diverged and two or more languages came to be used where there had been only one.

Any living language constantly changes; you have only to read the Authorized Version of the Bible to see how much English has changed in some 360 years despite the stabilizing influence of printing and good communications. So, gradually, the separated groups would cease to understand one another. Even so, the resulting languages retain enough features in common to make it obvious that they are related.

The Indo-European Family

Let us look in more detail at one language family. About half the world’s population speak a language classified as belonging to the Indo-European family. It is no accident that the word for three, for example, is so similar in Russian (tri), German (drei), French (trois), Danish (tre), Dutch (drie), Irish (trí), Greek (treĩs), Lithuanian (trys), Sanskrit (trí), Albanian (tre), and so forth. All these languages are said to derive from the lost Indo-European.

Many of these are less like children of that ancient speech than grandchildren because many are said to derive from lost languages that were themselves offshoots of Indo-European. For example, Welsh, Breton, Gaelic, and so forth, are listed as descendants of an old Celtic speech that sprang from Indo-European. Russian, Polish, Serbian, Czech, and so forth, trace their ancestry through an ancient Slavonic parent. English, Dutch, German, and so forth, had a common Germanic parent.

Classifying Languages

Only comparatively recently, since about the end of the eighteenth century, have linguists begun to analyze the history and relationship of living languages. Before that they tended to compare merely the written forms of words in different languages, but there is much more to the family relationships than that. Even when two languages have few similar words, they may put sentences together in a way that shows an affinity between them.

Take the example of Lao and Chinese. It would be difficult to find many words similar in these two languages, yet they have three other important features in common. First, one word in both languages may have several different meanings according to the tone of voice used when saying it. For example, the Lao word mu spoken with a low tone of voice, means friend, while with a rising tone it means pig.

Second, most words have only one syllable or are made up of several one-syllable words strung together.

Third, when speaking of a number of objects one must use a word called a classifier every time to identify the class of objects to which they belong. Thus a Laotian cannot just say ‘Three girls,’ but must say, ‘Girl three persons,’ showing that girls belong to the class of ‘people.’ These three features suggest that Chinese and Lao are relatives within the same language family.

On the other hand, no great importance is attached to the script in which a language is written. English and Vietnamese both use the Roman alphabet, which the Vietnamese deliberately adopted in the seventeenth century, but the languages are very different. Japanese and Chinese use similar writing, which causes some persons to associate them together. Yet they are classified in altogether different language families. Conversely, English and Russian, listed as distant relatives within the same family, use different scripts.

Learning Difficulties

Perhaps you can now see why some languages are much easier for us to learn than others. A foreign language belonging to the same family as our own will usually have many sounds, words or sentence patterns that we find familiar. The less related another language is to ours the stranger it will seem. At first we may even be unable to say the sounds, and the order in which words follow one another may strike us as bizarre.

Compare the German numbers one to ten with the English: eins, zwei, drei, vier, fünf, sechs, sieben, acht, neun, zehn. Especially if you remember that German “z” is pronounced “ts” and German “v” is pronounced “f,” you can see at once how alike they are. Now look at the Lao numbers: neung, sohng, sahm, si, ha, hok, chet, bpaat, gow, sip. There is not one sound in common with the English. How much less alike they would seem if it could be shown in writing that each Lao number has to be spoken in a certain tone of voice that you memorize along with the word!

Take a look at word order. In English you might ask, “How many daughters have you?” In German that would be “Wieviele Töchter haben Sie?” Here, word for word, the structure is the same as English. But Lao says, “Chow mi luk sow chag kon?” Literally that means, “You have child female how many persons?” Structurally quite different from English.

Often words found in one language simply have no equivalent in languages of other families. Consequently it is much harder to translate into a language belonging to a different family. For instance, the Watchtower magazine in the Thai language uses the same word to convey what is meant by the English words sympathy, empathy and consideration. Separate words do not exist in Thai (or Lao, its close relative) to convey these subtle distinctions. On the other hand, English makes do with the one word carry where Lao and Thai have separate words meaning “to carry in the hand,” “to carry on the shoulder,” “to carry on a balance pole,” “to carry in the arms” or “to carry on the back.”

To help pupils to cope with this unfamiliarity of some languages, new teaching methods have been devised. One is sometimes called the direct method. The learner masters basic sentences and sentence patterns right from the start. He learns grammar as it relates to the sentences he already knows instead of plowing through it at the outset and learning long lists of vocabulary without being able to speak or understand the simplest sentence.

In the first century of our common era God gave some men the miraculous ability to speak languages they had never learned. No one possesses such a gift from God today. But, then, it is not needed. People who want to help to carry the good news of God’s kingdom to a new place must painstakingly learn the languages spoken there. However, as right-hearted people respond, the bulk of the preaching work is rapidly assumed by local men and women, speakers of every language family on earth. Thus the uniting word of truth triumphs over the disuniting confusion of tongues among those who wish to cooperate in praising Jehovah, the One who gave man the gift of language.

[Footnotes]

[Chart on page 13]

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INDO-EUROPEAN

HINDU SANSKRIT

PERSIAN

OLD PERSIAN

ARYAN

ARMENIAN

ALBANIAN

BALTO-SLAVIC

BALTIC LITHUANIAN

SLOVAK

SLAVIC

POLISH

BULGARIAN

RUSSIAN

GERMANIC

GREEK

MODERN GREEK

OSCAN

LATIN ITALIC

ROMANIAN

ITALIAN

PORTUGUESE

SPANISH

FRENCH

CELTIC

BRITANNIC

BRETON

WELSH

SCOTTISH

IRISH

GOTHIC

OLD GERMAN

OLD NORSE

ICELANDIC

DANISH

NORWEGIAN

SWEDISH

ANGLO-SAXON

ENGLISH

GERMAN

DUTCH