From: Andrew Jarrette
Message: 41293
Date: 2005-10-12
--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Andrew Jarrette <anjarrette@...> wrote:
> I actually should have emphasized that the Biblical stories of Shem
and Japheth and Ham, especially if taken metaphorically as
descriptions of groups of languages, may have a kernel of truth (apart
from these names actually being used formerly to name three language
families), since Nostratic theory says that Indo-European and Semitic
are ultimately related.
Surely it's just the recurring idea of monogenesis!
Have you read Genesis x recently? Note that Ham begot Canaan, who in
turn begot Heth (i.e. the Hittites), and that Shem begot Lud, who is
presumed to mean the Lydians. Now, the Hittites and Lydians were
Indo-European, and the Canaanites were Semitic - or at least, the
Phoenicians were, and Sidon is the eldest son of Canaan. I don't
think there's anything particularly Semitic about Elam either.-- Please see my response to Glen Gordon's critique of my paragraph quoted above. I started out non-serious (or just a tiny bit serious), then defended myself over-seriously, unintentionally, to the point of erring and misrepresenting my intentions.
No, I only have a casual knowledge of the Bible (despite studying sections of it many years ago in university courses on the Bible as a foundation of English literature, and occasional perusal since then), so I wasn't aware of the contradictions between Biblical legend and actual linguistic genealogy. It seems that the Biblical writers were not aware of the actual linguistic relations between the languages represented by the personages mentioned above, and therefore did not manage to convey the actual family relationships among these languages by way of reference to family relationships between men. Or perhaps they didn't really care all that deeply, they just had to come up with or hand down some account or other to explain the variety of languages.
Andrew