02-18-2012, 01:51 PM
(02-18-2012, 01:49 AM)cladking Wrote: I'm coming to lose more and more confidence in peoples' ability to communicate. I find the Tower of Babel story simply fascinating and not incredible in the least. The language became confused because before the invention of symbolic language there was only one way to understand a statement. It was like computer code and if you didn't understand it, you knew. Someone changed the way words were used and wrote it right on the structure. It caught on because it was far easier to use and because the old language had become unwieldy due to rapidly advancing human knowledge. The switch to the new language ultimately set us back 3500 years and has left us with a great deal of misunderstanding and almost complete misunderstanding of the ancients.
We had to switch. Numbers and shit. You can't draw 200 light bulbs on the check when you want to pay the electric bill.
Plus, think about the layers of languages needed to make a computer function. Remember typing in the actual programs back in the day? It took an entire day of typing to play Wombat and debugging was a bitch.
The first peoples weren't as abstract as we are. They didn't need our depth of knowledge. I do firmly believe most ancient peoples understood the natural sciences better than most moderns except for medicine/health/healing.