1321: The Effects of Babel Jul 24, 2018

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Like any science, linguistics has been used for various agendas. For instance, some people used to believe—and tried to prove—that Hebrew was the world's first language, but while the Afro-Asiatic family dates back farther than just about any other, it is certainly not the first. Moreover, many early scholars attempted to show that Hebrew, Latin, and Greek were all related, even though Hebrew is completely different structurally. Both of these early attempts tried to relate what was known about languages at the time to the Biblical story of the Tower of Babel, and was a hotly contested issue from the start to the finish of the Enlightenment period. These were attempts to make sense of language and linguistic history were early attempts at philology and what would later become the field of linguistics.
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