Genesis 11:7
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Come, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another`s speech. (ASV)
Pro
This seems like a Just So Story for why people speak different languages.
The truth is different; people continually make changes to the languages that they speak, changing pronunciation, adding and dropping words and grammatical features, etc. And different groups of people change their languages in different ways, ultimately making their languages unintelligible. This is very evident in southeastern Europe, where the Romance languages originated from Latin by gradually diverging from it and from each other. And it is known to have happened elsewhere, and reasonably inferred to have happened before the recorded history of many places.
Con
The argument for error first opines, "This seems like a Just So Story for why people speak different languages."
It then speculates that, "The truth is different;..."
It presents, an argument for language to change over time, "people continually make changes to the languages that they speak, changing pronunciation, adding and dropping words and grammatical features, etc. And different groups of people change their languages in different ways, ultimately making their languages unintelligible. This is very evident in southeastern Europe, where the Romance languages originated from Latin by gradually diverging from it and from each other. And it is known to have happened elsewhere, and reasonably inferred to have happened before the recorded history of many places."
The argument does not prove that languages could not have begun as described in the Biblical account. It presents, at most, a competing "Just So Story." So, now, we have two accounts for the appearance of the various languages either of which may be true.
Neutral
If the anthropology of language is correct that its roots were lost some time in the Stone Age hundreds of thousands of years ago, one has to consider facts like a Mayan epic being exactly the Greek alphabet.
