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Chinese Characters—Why Are They Written That Way?Awake!—1984 | August 8
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“All the earth continued to be of one language and of one set of words,” says Genesis 11:1. The unity, however, was misused by the people in defiance of God’s purpose for them. “They now said: ‘Come on! Let us build ourselves a city and also a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a celebrated name for ourselves, for fear we may be scattered over all the surface of the earth.’”—Genesis 11:4.
The tower, of course, was the infamous Tower of Babel. Thus, it was in the land of Shinar in Mesopotamia that God confused man’s language. “That is why its name was called Babel, because there Jehovah had confused the language of all the earth, and Jehovah had scattered them from there over all the surface of the earth.”—Genesis 11:9.
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Chinese Characters—Why Are They Written That Way?Awake!—1984 | August 8
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What must be noted, however, is that the Bible does not say that all the other languages developed or derived from the “one language and one set of words” used by the people there at Shinar. What is indicated is that the languages resulting from the confusion were so different from and unrelated to one another that the people had to abandon the construction project and move out “over all the surface of the earth” because they could no longer understand or communicate with one another.
Evidently what happened was that the confusion process obliterated the original language patterns in the minds of the people and replaced them with new ones. Thus the new languages that they spoke were completely different from what they had known before. These were not offshoots or spin-offs of the original “one language.”
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