Linguist Rudolf Wachter has an amazingly simple explanation. Christian Vontobel interviewed him for mozaik.
mozaik: Professor Rudolf Wachter, why are there different languages?
Rudolf Wachter: It’s actually a very simple thing: Take a group of people who speak the same language, divide them in half and send one half away. Since language always evolves, whether external influence is involved or not, the language of the two groups will split into two different languages over the course of generations. I would estimate that after 250 years the communication between members of the two groups will still work well, but after 500 years it will already work quite badly and after 1’000 years not at all. Then only linguists can determine the relationship of the two languages, especially by observing the regular sound change (in one or the other language or in both), as can be observed, for example, between English and German in the examples red – rot, dead – tot, bread – Brot, lead (Blei) – Lot, shred – Schrot.
Thus, the language confusion arises from the language development, as it is already described in the Tower of Babel.How much time does it take for language relationships to disappear completely?
After about 10,000 years, even such no longer obvious relationship features are no longer present, because languages also change in their vocabulary, their forms, sentence formation rules, in short: In the long run, no stone remains on the other. It is easy to imagine how fundamentally and thousands of times human languages have changed in the at least 200,000 years that our species has existed – and undoubtedly also spoke – before they became, quite by chance, the way they are now.
So languages as an oral means of communication are constantly changing; but what is the impact on written language?
There are factors that slow down language change, the most important of which is writing (which, however, has only existed for a modest 5000 years). This is because when people read, for example, literary texts in their language that are already several decades or even centuries old, they incorporate the earlier state of the language into their current linguistic competence, so to speak. What they cannot glean from the written texts, however, is the exact pronunciation in earlier times. We would be very alienated today if we heard Goethe or Schiller speak, because no one today pronounces German the way they did back then. Not to speak of the German of Luther and Zwingli. This ultimately explains the strange, antiquated orthography of languages like English or French. A few centuries ago, it corresponded quite well to the pronunciation. Today, it has to be painstakingly learned by us because it deviates so much from the current pronunciation. Nevertheless, people do not love orthographic reforms because they are very confusing to those who have already learned to read and poorly conceived reforms (like that of German in 1996) are even more of a nuisance.
The biblical story of the Babylonian confusion of languages takes place in the distant past. What does it tell us about the knowledge of language diversity and its geographical spread at that time?
Encounters with people whom we do not understand because they speak a different language have been going on for millennia among our species who initially lived largely nomadically. But we have always sought explanations for such strange observations. The story of the Tower of Babel is a good example. Since the language barrier is a hindrance and foreign language learning is laborious, it is not surprising that the „language confusion“ was interpreted as God’s punishment at that time. Personally, I consider language diversity rather enriching. It is always fascinating to observe how one language can express something highly efficiently for which the other needs a cumbersome formulation. For example, for the two Latin words „Troia capta“ we need much longer expressions, such as „after the conquest of Troy“ or „after Troy had been conquered“. Conversely, I don’t know how one could formulate in Latin (or in any other language I know) the German proverb „Mitgefangen, mitgehangen“ or the Italian „traduttore, traditore“ as succinctly and elegantly. So language helps shape our thinking and new thoughts and ideas change language and a little differently in each language community. I think that’s good, because nothing is better for humanity than the diversity of ideas.
(Übersetzung: mozaik mit Hilfe von DeepL)
Rudolf Wachter
Rudolf Wachter (born 1954) is professor emeritus of historical-comparative linguistics at the Universities of Basel and Lausanne. In addition to Latin, Greek and Indo-Germanic linguistics, ancient epigraphy and the history of the alphabet, he has also been working on the history of the Davos landscape since his retirement.