Language, religion, origins, &c
Interesting fact I learned today: Muslims consider the Arabic Koran to have been transmitted directly from God in Arabic. Only the Arabic Koran is really the Koran. This is, I think, unique among world religions. Hence the tradition of naming direct translations “The Meaning of the Koran” or calling them interpretations, because only the original is the god-given message. The rest, it seems, is human meddling. Ironic that the most human thing of all, language, would be seen as both the pure, inhumanly sacred vector of God, and also the impure, all too human and imperfect vector of humans prone to misunderstanding and mistranslation. The idea that any human language is more sacred, holy or accurate than any other is ridiculous, but that’s far from the most ridiculous thing in religion.
Islam contrasts with Christianity, which thrives on translations. The Bible was written in Aramaic, Hebrew and Greek. For a thousand years, the standard version of the Bible was in Latin, a translation, and Latin was the liturgical language. But then again, according to the selfsame Bible, God created all the world’s languages specifically to confuse humans. If this were so, you’d expect him not to communicate in any human language — at least not any that existed before Babel — when trying to be clear about his intents for the universe (a misconception those who haven’t read the Bible have about its purpose).
While we’re on the topic of divine revelations, I wouldn’t mind a revelation, though a scientific one would do, about the origin of language. It is, with only a bit of hyperbole, as mysterious as the origin of the universe or of life. We know a lot about how the universe evolved after the Big Bang and about how animals evolved from the primordial life and about how languages evolve from their ancestors, but how the universe, the first life, or the first language came into existence is very, very unclear. The relationship between sounds and concepts is essentially arbitrary. It makes no difference whether I call water afdaxhamasr or water, so long as my friends and my family and you and everyone else calls it the same. So how did the first association come about? We can explain why water is called water by studying the history of the word, but how did there come to be a word for water in the first place, and how was that word chosen? Did language develop once or many times? Does every language that exists today have a common ancestor, and if so, can we reconstruct it? (No, we probably can’t even if we could show that there was a common ancestor. But the rest of those are open.)
