Speak to me in many voices Make them all sound like one; Let me see your sacred mysteries Reveal to me the Unknown Tongue

Well buggrit. We thought we had identified a gap in the market, i.e. a dearth of Creationist Scientists claiming that the O.T. account of language divergence is as valid as the Evolutionary Linguistics version and should be taught alongside it at univesity. Not even Conservapedia goes there. So we were halfway through rebranding Riddled as Intelligible De-Sign, hoping to extract a lucrative donation from the Discovery Institute, only to discover the Institute of Creation Linguistics.* Buggrit I say again, this time with feeling.

Left: Tower of Babel. Do not confuse with

Right: Bower of Table

Also easily confused with

Below: Tower of Cable

What set us to thinking about Historical / Comparative Linguistics was the discovery that the Library pixies, not clear on the concept of a 'language tree', had filed various dictionaries and grammars among the branches of the olives in the Old Entomologist garden bar.

This was all very well until last week's gusty conditions brought the second volume of Wackernagel's Altindische Grammatik down on Another Kiwi's head causing him to forget the words of 'Mademoiselle from Armentières'.

Wheeler / Misner / Thorne's "Gravitation" -- 1279
pages, 2.3 kg. A copy fell from a tree on Steve
Jobs' head and inspired him to invent the Apple

The Whackyweedia informs me that in mainstream comparative linguistics, the grouping of languages into a family or tree is not established until their common ancestral Proto-language has been reconstructed... a laborious process that creates work for entire generations of linguists.

Greenberg's far simpler Method of Multilateral Comparison is not well-thought-of among the linguists whom it threatens with widespread redundancies. "Greenberg may be right about the language families of Africa," they say, "but his methods are unsound".

Greenberg and his chief critic Lyle Campbell square off in debate:

Evidently Blue Öyster Cult favour the traditional approach.


* Sample 1:

I mean, really: how could accident, randomness, and the *Germans* come up with a word like "schadenfreude"?? It clearly is the product of divine intention...

Sample 2:

How does evolutionary linguistics explain the irreducible complexity of the expression "irreducible complexity"... ??