The Tower Of Babel

The Tower Of Babel: A History of Human Languages: From the First Words to Constructed LanguagesCourse-ResearchVita HarwoodSeries 'In Twelve Evenings' BOOK 35What Do I Already Know About This?Test your knowledge!Language feels ordinary until you ask a few simple questions. Where did it come from? Why can Russian, English, Persian, and Hindi be placed on the same enormous family tree? What does 'dead language' mean if its words continue through descendants, books, religion, and scholarship? Why have some ancient scripts been deciphered while others still resist every proposed key?THE TOWER OF BABEL turns the history of language into twelve connected investigations. The course begins where direct evidence is scarce, with the origin of speech, then moves through language families, the comparative method, language isolates, language loss, and revival. Writing comes next: cuneiform, alphabets, undeciphered scripts, and the logic researchers use when they try to read an unknown system.The book then tests our everyday definition of language. ASL and BSL are not 'English on the hands.' Braille records language but is not itself a language. Morse code encodes text. Whistled speech can carry the structure of spoken language through a different channel. Esperanto and fictional languages show what can happen when a designed system leaves its creator’s desk and starts being used by a community.The final lesson brings the story into the present: English as a lingua franca, the internet, machine translation, artificial intelligence, and a thought experiment about a message from an unknown civilization.Written for readers who want a connected introduction, each evening includes key terms, a ten-question quiz, and a small field assignment. The book closes with 120 explained answers, a glossary, source notes, and suggestions for further reading.