Why is Edenics not recognized as a serious linguistic theory?

Question

Many people know the Biblical tale of the Tower of Babel, when God broke apart the world's singular language into 70 different branches.

Most linguists don't give this a second thought, or anything more than folklore.

But I've read some very convincing literature that traces a large portion of many of the world's great languages back to one parent language that is very similar to modern Hebrew. The evidence is pretty convincing.

For example the English word "DiReCtion" is very similar to the Hebrew word "DeReC" meaning "route". Another basic example is the Japanese word "SaMuRai" which is very similar to the Hebrew word "ShoMeR" which means "watchman".

More example are here: http://www.edenics.org/languages-3/

My question is, what is the reason this theory is not more widely recognized? Is it because it tries to legitimize something from the Bible and is therefore seen as unscientific?

Answer 1

Modern linguistics does not rule out the possibility that all languages of the world descended from a single language. But the mainstream consensus seems to be an agnostic one: Most think that this hypothesis is not testable, at least not with the current data.

Languages change. More you try to track those changes back in time using scientific methods (comparative and internal reconstruction), less you become certain about the properties of the proto-language.

For instance, now linguists have a pretty clear picture of the properties of the Proto-Indo-European language, the ancestor of English, Spanish, Russian, Hindi an many others, conjectured to be spoken some time between 7th and 4th millennia BC. But there are many unresolved problems and uncertainties.

These uncertainties cause problems in so called long range reconstructions. When you try to apply the comparative method to proto-languages, most of the time you come up with things like "the word for 'foot' must be a consonant followed by a vowel followed by a consonant followed by a vowel (CVCV)". Obviously it doesn't help much.

So, most mainstream linguists seem to be inclined to think that these uncertainties make long range reconstructions unfeasible past a certain point in time. But some linguists do nevertheless work on long range reconstructions using more or less accepted methods. (check here for example)

Besides, we have very good reasons to conclude that Hebrew cannot be the proto-world language. It's a part of the well-studied Semitic language family. It has current (like Arabic) and historical (like Akkadian) relatives. There is ample evidence that together they go back to an older proto-language: Proto-Semitic. And there is also evidence that Proto-Semitic, in turn, goes back to an even older proto-language called Proto-Afroasiatic.

The "convincing" examples you give are not convincing at all. The English word "direction", for instance, has a well established etymology that goes back to Proto-Indo-European, through French and Latin. Those are chance resemblances. If you scan enough words, you're eventually going to come up with some words with somehow similar meanings and that look somehow similar between any two languages. So, this definitely isn't a scientific method. Scientific comparison requires regular correspondences. Many of them. Try to find some material on how Proto-Indo-European was painstakingly reconstructed by linguists with more than a century's work.

In short, no, the Edenics is not rejected because it tries to legitimize something from the Bible. It's rejected simply because there is no scientific evidence that supports Edenics and there is ample scientific evidence that rules it out.

Answer 2

As an addendum to cyco130's excellent answer, it's easy to see based on simple math that resemblances like the ones you cite can tell us nothing about language relationship.

From looking at some of the materials in the website you link to, the procedure seems to be: (a) ignore vowels; (b) treat consonants as interchangeable if they are members of the same phonetic class, of which there are six (bilabials, dentals, gutturals, fricatives, liquids, and nasals). (You can also metathesize or add nasals to your heart's content, but I'll ignore that.) This means that there are only six distinctive elements which can be compared. So if we're looking at a word that contains three consonants, there are a total of 6x6x6 = 216 possible types of such words. Within each type, all the words could be related to each other by this method.

Now how many words are there in the world's languages? At a very conservative estimate, let's say there are 4000 languages, each with a lexicon of 10,000 words. That's 40,000,000 words. Each of the 216 classes would then contain an average of 40,000,000/216 = 185,185 words, all of which would be considered "similar to each other". Now all you need is to find some pairs of these words that are also vaguely similar in their semantics, and you have things like shomer - samurai. As many of them as you want, between any two languages you choose.

Even if you make the phonetic rules stricter, so that you can only compare d with d and not with t and so on, the math will still mean that most of these resemblances will be due to chance.

This is why Edenics is not recognized as a serious linguistic theory, and also why scientific historical linguistics does not work with resemblances at all, but with regular correspondences, which are a completely different concept.

(By the way, the older form of the word samurai was saburai, which looks a lot less like shomer. This is usually the case with these accidental resemblances: the more you know about the words' histories, the less similar they look.)

Answer 3

The reason "Edenics" isn't taken seriously is that it isn't, by scientific standards, serious.

To establish a kinship between two languages, linguists need to have whole series of words that can be traced to a common origin.

So, if we did not know Latin, we could reconstruct its lexic from French, Castillian, Catalan, Italian, Portuguese, Rumanian, etc.

For instance:

Here are the words for "horse" in those languages:

Portuguese: cavalo

Spanish: caballo

Italian: cavallo

Rumanian: cal

French: cheval

Catalan: cavall

From here, how can we find the Latin word for horse?

It seems that it should start with either "c" or "ch". But perhaps this is a coincidence? How can we know if it is not?

Because we have lots of words that begin with "c" in Italian, Portuguese, Castillian, Rumanian, etc., and with "ch" in French:

Portuguese - cabra, caminho, canção

French - chèvre, chemin, chanson

Which shows that there are regular transformations between French and Portuguese; some initial consonant in Latin morphed into "c" in Portuguese, Catalan, Italian, Rumanian, but into "ch" in French (and if we look at a map, we see that Portuguese and Rumanian are placed, respectively, at the Western and Eastern extremes of the geographical extension of Romance languages, so it isn't likely that the same innovation happened to both of them; it looks like the Latin consonant was preserved in both - and transformed in French.

The same reasoning helps us establishing that the first vowel of the Latin language should be an "a", not an "e". The second consonant is more difficult, because it went three different directions, morphing into "b" in Castillian, disappearing in Rumanian, and morphing into "v" in the remaining languages. But other considerations have led linguists to believe it was a "b" in Latin. And so on, so that we can reasonably guess that the Latin root for "horse" is something like "caball-".

We do know Latin, however, and we can see that the Latin word was "caballus" (OK; it wasn't; it was "equus" - which gave us the Portuguese, Castillian, Rumanian and Catalan word for "mare". "Caballus" was Vulgar Latin, and comes from the Classic word for "horse pack", which in turn is a borrowing from unknown origin).

Now compare this with the pair "direct"/"d-r-k". Which other English words correspond to a Hebrew (or other Semitic) root filled with "i" and "e"? Or, the other way round, which other English words, stripped from its vowels, correspond to a Semitic three-consonantal root? Do we find that "derelict", or "derailed", "deranged", "correct", "erect", "ferret", correspond to Semitic roots "d-r-k", "d-r-l", "d-r-g", "c-r-c", "r-c-t", "f-r-t", etc.? I do not know Hebrew, but I bet you that none of these happens, with the possible exception of "erect"/"eretz", where anyway the semantic relation is quite loose (upright vs great). And that is not random: it is a consequence of English and Hebrew not being related in any knowable way (they are possibly related, perhaps through a proto-language of both Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Afro-Asiatic - but we do not have the means, as things are, to reconstruct such proto-language). However, we do know the origin of the English words I listed above; they are borrowings from Latin or Old French; and the obvious relation between "direct" and "correct" can only be explained by the fact that "rect-" is a Latin root, and "di-" and "co-" are Latin prefixes. (If "direct" was related to "d-r-k", then "correct" is unexplainable, for in Semitic languages both words would be either unrelated or share the same three-consonant root - and then the English word for "correct" should be something like "daruct" or "deroct", which evidently isn't the case.)

In fewer words, bats are not related to nightingales, albeit the obvious fact that both can fly; on the contrary, nightingales are related to ostrichs, who don't. The flying is coincidental; the egg-laying vs breastfeeding is not.

Answer 4

The idea that all languages derive from Hebrew has been around for a long time. It is a theological construct, not a scientific theory. By the way, the tower of Babel story (Gen 11,1-9) does not say anything about “70 different branches”, nor does it claim that Hebrew was the primeval language.

Answer 5

Though cyco's answer mostly says it all, wanted to add my 2 cents. How can you distinguish between a scientific approach and one that isn't? If you've read Karl Popper, you know the simplest litmus test is that of "falsifiability": for every theory, there must exist at least one possible experiment that could put the theory in the garbage bin by yielding a result contrary to what was expected.

"Edenics" and its kin (Intelligent Design) are for the most part un-falsifiable. Since they're based off faith, you can get away with any illogicity or irregularity in them, as well as any deviation between their predictions and reality by simply claiming such is God's will. Nice if you want to make a theological point, but useless if you want to do science - we humans do science with the aim of understanding our world and trying to predict events in it.

The reconstruction of proto-Indo-European, as well as proto-Semitic and other last-common-ancestor of various language families has been the result of linguists applying methodic analyses of data, looking further than simple commonalities but to the underlying causes of them and searching for regular processes that could explain them.

Claiming everybody spoke a proto-Semitic language and then, ex-nihilo, full blown and totally different grammars appeared in less than a generation with no solution of continuity is a far-fetched proposition that requires a lot of hard data to be demonstrated - difficult at best. Except if it's said as a statement of faith in which case no proof is required.

Answer 6

The key advance in the study of the history of languages was Rasmus Rask's suggestion in his 1818 Prize Essay that Danish, other Germanic languages, and Latin and Greek, were descended from a language which perhaps no longer existed. This explained why previous attempts to derive the various modern languages from Hebrew or some other known language had been fruitless.

I don't agree with some comments here that the Hebrew-as-progenitor theory is inherently unscientific. In its day, before the 19th century, it was a plausible theory to explain the resemblances among languages that people had begun to notice. It was superceded when scholars realized, under the influence of the developing sciences of geology and Darwinian evolution, that large differences among contemporary languages could result, over long spans of time, from small changes of a sort that can still be observed.

We now tend to trace the historical development of language systems (sets of phonological rules and so on) rather than individual words.