Item — HN Reader

When I was in high school at a private school, I was surrounded by students who were religious but didn’t have much curiosity. I got into a debate with basically my whole class about how languages shift and change over time, and everyone was saying that languages stay the same and that they were all determined at the Tower of Babel.

I used the examples of Latin to Spanish and English, or Old English to new English.

I say that to say, languages changing over time is to some people not actually something they believe happens. The facts are right there in front of you, but some people cannot have their minds changed no matter how much sense you make.

5 comments

Here’s one verse from the Bible itself that shows that language changed: 1 Samuel 9:9:

> (Formerly in Israel, when a man went to inquire of God, he said, “Come, let us go to the seer”; for he who is now called a prophet was formerly called a seer.)

I love that one because it translates so well into English because we also have an older and a newer word for close enough to the same thing. Though when saying older and newer I should note that the words “prophet” and “seer” have been used consistently since the very first English translation, Wycliffe’s in ~1382. Maybe it’s more the feel of the words. (In Bible Gateway’s catalogue of English translations, only the CEV doesn’t use both of those words: <https://www.biblegateway.com/verse/en/1sam9.9>; I disqualify OJB as not English.)

That’s the only one I can think of off the top of my head that’s specifically about language, but there are plenty of others about changed customs over time, in Old and New Testaments.

Arguably the CEV version is clearer, because approximately no-one knows the difference between ‘prophet’ and ‘seer’ in English (a seer is a practitioner of divination). I’m assuming that the distinction was similar in the original (ie that the original didn’t just use two words for the same thing).

There's a very easy way out for them: Just claim that the bible is rather metaphorical than literal, and many things can be interpreted to be in line with scientific findings. That seems to be at least what protestant churches in Europe seem to do.

Easy for you to say, but who says they're looking for a way out? It's often easier to find a reason to stay where you are, and easiest to not even need one.

Huh, English has changed perceptibly over just my lifetime.

And animals have evolved perceptibly in my lifetime, they still don't believe in evolution. I grew up in a culture of Jesus Freaks. The way they place faith above evidence and logic is so disturbing and irritating to me

> animals have evolved perceptibly in my lifetime

? Which animals? Evolution requires orders of magnitude longer time spans. I doubt we're perceptibly different (in any genetic sense) than Homo sapiens from 200,000 years ago. I'm not sure the change from that point is perceptible.

> Jesus Freaks

That people accept that language on HN would seem to tell us a lot about the population here.

There are many well documented cases of rapid evolution: a population of African elephants became 50% tuskless at birth in a single generation, urban fox anatomy diverged from rural, frogs in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone turned black, the Peppered Moth turned black in the industrial revolution.

> ? Which animals? Evolution requires orders of magnitude longer time spans

Acktually (push glasses) selective breeding is a form of evolution and it takes only a few generations to see perceptible changes.

> I doubt we're perceptibly different

If you're around various ethnic groups long enough, you'll start recognizing which group a person you are unacquainted with belongs to. And I don't mean the obvious differences.

Sort of like "My Fair Lady" where the linguist could tell where a person came from by the way they spoke.

Are you claiming there are evolutionary differences to race?

"perceptibly" perhaps not so much? blue eyes are definitely newer.

pale skin perhaps only after agriculture replaced meat eating for D3 production.

despite what Sliders intimated, Europeans are more Cro-mag than 'thals ;)

There's a whole industry of cat breeders going from wild cat servals to domesticated house cat, giving them an F number for how many generations they've been bred away from wild cat.

Most people can't accept reality.

You're talking about ignorant teenagers. Is there more proof that large groups of people don't believe languages change over time?

> I was surrounded by students who were religious but didn’t have much curiosity

That seems like a given. If you're curious, you'll soon see through any ideology you were spoon-fed as a child, religious or otherwise.