Why the people in Babel did not try to learn each other's language?

Question

Regardless of the historicity of the account, the people who wrote it down, edited it, listened to the story, and edited again, must have realized some people would be confused by the characters simply giving up after they had overcome much more physically demanding hurdles. The authors and the audience must have had this literary sensitivity. This raises the question: Why was this not adressed? Why was this not commented on? Why did the author of the story of the Tower of Babel did not consider, or did not address, or glossed over the possibility of some of his characters trying to learn the other's language to continue the enterprise?

Answer 1

I recall an email disagreement I had with a Linguist. We went back and forth a couple of times regarding the nature of ambiguity. I suddenly realized that he was using one definition, I was using the other. I literally sat back in my chair and laughed out loud. The conversation was about ambiguity and it evidenced ambiguity.¹ I love self-referential examples.

If that's true within one language, how will cross-linguistic communication work?

Answering that question answers the OP's question. I first present an elephant in the room that needs to be walked out of the room. I then suggest that translation, or cross-linguistic communication, is quite complex. This is followed by a subset of categories of this complexity. The implication, within what I think is overwhelming evidence, is that there was such an extensive break-down in unity within the Tower of Babel project, that moving forward was simply impossible. And, it wasn't addressed because the absurdity of continuing could not even be entertained as a possibility. I apologize for the length, but the length actually helps support my answer--translation is complex. Frankly, I don't think I could have made it shorter. Someone with expertise could have easily made it much, much longer. I couldn't help but think such a set of books would form the basis for a PhD in Hermeneutics. And, for a rough, numerical estimate of the complexity of a very large, highly linguistically rich, project, the UN employs between 350 and 400 translators, each of whom need to be able to translate at least 3 languages. Now, think of the All-Hands meetings for the large projects that will follow after the Tower of Babel--the tower to the skies!

An elephant in the room assumption

I may be wrong, so give me a little leeway, but an underlying assumption in the question might be that translation is only a little more difficult than matching words between Source Language (SL) and Destination Language (DL), and then adjusting the syntax. In the 1950s it was thought by technologists that computerized language translation would be easy and chess would be hard². The UN translator's jobs were predicted to quickly become a thing of the past. Since there are more moves in a chess game than there are atoms in the universe, the assumed order of the solutions seemed obvious. We now know that the technologists were wrong, very badly wrong. Deep Blue has won. Over against that language translation by machine depends on Neural Network technology. Neural Networks aren't bad in any way, but the technology provides a way to solve a problem without fully understanding why or how the pattern matching actually works.³ It learns the patterns; it doesn't explain the patterns.

I'm risking being shot at here, but even on SE-BH I've sensed a fondness for the so-called literal translations; translations I find to communicate quite poorly (and which I've used on SE-BH to generally help bridge the linguistic chasm for those who don't know the original languages). The problem is: literal translations force the recipient to translate the translation in order to understand it (thus the reason I use the term bridge). Meaning is not just provided by the words; there's a lot of in-between that also conveys the intended meaning. Though there's a positive to literal translations: the publication of such translations fosters the need for questions on SE-BH. So, that's good. A little ironic (aka, ambiguous), but good.

Since ultimately we're talking about a sacred text, I must quickly place in context a balance to that previous point. I hold as univocally true: The words present in the original text are exactly the words the Sovereign God wanted, wants, and will continue to want. And the syntactic relationships were also sovereignly chosen. The point of the previous 2 paragraphs and this one is in tension. Literal translation attempts to make transparent the original choices, but it introduces a great deal of ambiguity. And yet the original text is to be held as preeminently authoritative. The tension is caused by the fact that the objective truth captured perfectly with the original words and syntax must be conveyed into a subjective context. Communication is commune-ication; an intimate meeting of more than one mind. Also, the tension becomes evident in some conversations where a person conflates the SL with the DL. They implicitly, even subconsciously, because of the implied transparency, think SL and DL are one and the same. The DL is presumed to be nothing more than an overlay placed on the SL (it assumes one is fluent in overlay-ese, something I believe requires several PhDs).

This elephant assumption of "literal means accurate" must be led out of the room or there is no answer to the OP's question. Removing this elephant sets the stage for presenting the complexity of cross-linguistic communication. A hurdle that is not easy to achieve, especially within the resources of an enormous project like the Tower of Babel.

The tension just talked about brings me to an answer to the OP's question.

Translation Complexity

Translation is hard. Traduttore, traditore is a statement, popular among Linguists, that captures the sense of the difficulty. Literally (ahem) the phrase says, "Translation, Traitor". It's meaning is something like, "Translation always betrays the original meaning." Of course, not translating is even worse. If I say, neno, the vast majority of the readers, perhaps every one, won't know what that word means. It's Swahili, for 'word'. But, like Greek λόγος, does Swahili neno actually mean English 'word'? Actually, no. Translation is unavoidably necessary. But, it's hard.

Why?

Picture a hyper-dimensional Venn Diagram with dozens of intertwined circles of various sizes. A dozen dimensions is probably not sufficient, and each dimension having 3 to 7 circles is also probably not sufficient. The intended meaning is the little hyper dimensional whatch-ma-call-do-decahedron in the middle. Got that? Good. You can stop here and read no further. You understand. O! That Venn Diagram is just one word as it relates to and within its context.

Furthermore, that meaning changes over time as you read each morpheme of the text. Dr. Ken Pike distilled this complexity down to Wave, Particle, and Field. Wave refers to the meaning as being dynamic and context dependent. Particle refers to the specific discrete meaning-conveying elements. And Field refers to the interplay of those two.

Wave can be further clarified by noting that a reader's understanding of the meaning of a word morphs over time as that person continues reading through a text. If I write, "A fox,..." you have, at that point, one meaning of fox. But, if I continue with, "A fox, the exotic dancer..." that's entirely different. And that's different than, "A fox like Pilate..." And the later can only be correctly understood after researching what 'fox' as a metaphor meant in 1st CE Israel. Hint: it didn't mean 'sly' which is the meaning of the modern English.

The point being, as a nutshell answer to the OP question, to translate one must apply the complex science/art of Hermeneutics to a Source Text--implicitly developing the Venn Diagram, which represents meaning in the SL--and produce a DL rendition that ideally forms the same Venn Diagram. That is extremely hard to do. Traduttore, traditore. It's fallible for two interlocutors to correctly understand each other when the SL and DL are the same language. To cross the chasm from SL to DL takes even more effort to do well.

To list the elements of the complexity of that Venn Diagram, to map the SL signs (ie symbols⁴) to that Venn Diagram, and then to map that Venn Diagram to the DL is extremely difficult. Indeed, it's impossible to do perfectly.⁵

So, what are some elements of this complex system?

A small subset of examples of that complexity

Purposeful ambiguity: Eugene Nida once asked UN translators what were the most difficult translation choices they had to make. The answer was 'diplomatic speech'. To be clear, that's something like the Godfather's, "Make him an offer he can't refuse." The purposeful ambiguity is meant to convey a calibrated response and the translator needs to somehow reproduce that same calibration. This doesn't include unpurposed ambiguity, which is also a factor in communication.

Word order (Original 1st stanza to Jaberwocky, years before it was published in Alice in Wonderland):

Twas bryllyg, and þe slythy toves
Did gyre and gymble in þe wabe: 
All mimsy were þe borogoves; 
And þe mome raths outgrabe.

Lewis Carroll brilliantly uses word order to convey meaning. In English, we largely recognize the function of the words through word order. This is also how we disambiguate cases like the written forms of nouns and verbs that are spelled the same: "I can notice the notice." Many languages don't use word order in this way. Notice I did not say, "word order doesn't matter." That's rarely, if ever, the case. It's just that the word order means different things in different languages. So, transferring that meaning between languages requires different solutions. Word order is used in Greek to signal information flow as well as emphasis.

Information Flow: That is, how new and old information are handled by the dynamics of the text. Different languages handle information flow in different ways. The idea behind information flow is how information is added to information so that an argument or story moves forward.

Comparison and Contrast: Different languages do comparison and contrast differently. It has been frequently taught that Greek δέ and καί mean 'but' and 'and', respectively--except when they mean 'and' and (less frequently) 'but', respectively. When I learned Greek, this confused me. It turns out that comparison and contrast in Greek are largely context dependent. δέ signals development (which can be either contrastive or comparative). And καί signals continuation, which can also be either, though more often it's simply neither. My point is that implicit context dependent contrast (and comparison) must be made explicit in other languages, and vice-versa. Also, ἀλλά is more of a corrective than strictly an adversative.

Aspect and Tense: Aspect refers to the nature of the action. For example, 'I am walking' and 'I walk'. Both are present tense in English, but the helper 'am' in the one case and the NULL (∅) in the second case convey the difference. Some languages do not have tense, the most notable of which are Mandarin and Thai. Context often determines the when of the action. Some languages use adverbs or other particles to convey time. There is a continuing argument among Greek scholars as to whether Greek was an aspectual or temporal language and where to draw the line. For some people groups the concept of time is almost irrelevant. Their language reflects that.

Gender and related Animacy: English is not a gendered language has generated many, many very confused discussions. The powerful position of English has not helped. To illustrate, the French for 'vagina' is masculine. If you thought something like, "I wonder how that happened", then how grammatical gender works is not intuitive for you. Another example is Greek "Holy Spirit"; the Greek is neuter. Should references to the Holy Spirit be 'it'? With a gendered language, the answer is very likely, 'yes'. For a non-gendered language, it's very likely, 'no'. Traduttore, traditore.

I've often wished instead of 'masculine', 'feminine', and 'neuter', this noun class would have been labeled 'spin' with 'left', 'right', and 'none'. But, that's water over the dam. There are languages that have more then 3 or 4 genders. The reason that masculine and feminine are used is that in many gendered languages, there's an ambiguous and loose association to male and female. This is similar to Animate languages where 'rock' is inanimate and 'fox' is animate. Sometimes in a text the associated biological masculinity and femininity applies, sometimes it doesn't. Thus there's a translation challenge. Sometimes the DL requires you to differentiate masculine from feminine, but the SL provides no clue for who the referent was. For example, the SL uses the word for 'sibling' and the DL must specify 'brother' or 'sister', it has no word for 'sibling'.

Quantities: I'm primarily referring to mass nouns. Some languages don't have these. An example in English is 'advice'. I can't say, I got 5 advices yesterday. Some languages, if translated literally to English, would be exactly that. English has to rework the sentence to say, "Yesterday, I received advice 5 times."

Idiomatic expressions: The French "à ta place" (Literally, "at your place") (Google translate gets this wrong by translating literally) means "if I were you". Another example is the English use of the word 'take'. We take a picture, but we don't actually take it. And then there's the expression used when going to the bathroom (typically male) using the word 'leak'. Why would you take that? There are 10's of thousands of examples of these idiomatic expressions across languages. And, being idiomatic, they are completely natural to the mother tongue speaker. And yet, taken literally, they make no sense. This is the stuff of stand-up comedy.

Awkward expressions: The innuendo in the Song of Solomon is extremely difficult to translate, especially when one considers the controversy, to begin with, around the actual meaning of the entire text. Another is that a straight-forward translation from a perfectly normal SL expression might produce a very awkward rendering in the DL. A non-textual example is certain hand gestures. I know of a woman whose emails were blocked because her name was an English swear word.

Word construction: A Linguist friend of mine translated for the Cheyenne. He shared with me the following single word: "Neníí'ėšêhe é'tá'ęšêhe" ("Neh-nee-ee'-eh-sheh-heh-eh-tah-eh-sheh-heh"). It means "I don't speak Cheyenne." Cheyenne builds meaning using morphemes. So, it strings together affixes and roots to form words with meaning more rich than words in English.

Discourse features: This is a very large topic to even illustrate (part of which was done above with "Comparison and contrast"). The current level of research tends to be language specific and not readily available--PhD theses. However, for Greek, see Steven E. Runge's excellent 400+ page book, "Discourse Grammar of the Greek New Testament" It presents an extensive list, examples, and clear explanations.

The point is that discourse features provide coherent flow of information. Since different languages do this differently, coherency is lost with literal renderings. An example of how discourse features are impacting current scholarship, making the meaning clearer, one should compare Otto Dibelius's commentary on James, originally published in 1924, with modern commentaries. Dibelius is perhaps the most cited author of a commentary on James, but his premise for the letter was that it was a loosely joined set of pieces of wisdom. Modern research shows the letter is a highly cohesive discourse.

The article: 'The' in one language can mean something slightly different in a different language. Greek is one example where the article can sometimes be better translated 'this' or 'that'. And sometimes it functions as a way of collecting a phrase into a single unit of speech. Something English can do with hyphens: A take-this-all-together phrase. Russian doesn't have an article, but uses context and case endings.

The case system. That is, Prefixes, suffixes, infixes, and roots: The *-fixes are so ubiquitous that Linguists tend to just refer to them as 'affixes'. The world's languages present over a dozen different cases. Some languages have none. Finnish has over 10. The point here is that the affixes function differently in different languages. A somewhat inadequate way of showing this is that when Greek is taught, the Dative case, signaled by Dative suffixes, is described to English students as "refers to the indirect object". That's the English-centic way of describing it. The actual meaning is much closer to, "signals that a noun bears a close, possibly personal, relationship to its head noun". For example, Greek doesn't make a affix distinction between Dative and Locative cases; other languages do. If a Greek author chooses to be clear relative to the Locative, he/she uses the preposition ἐν.

Etc: Communication happens through a complex set of Semantic and pragmatic (Pragmatics I haven't touched on) elements. There are very highly complex, many-to-many relationships across any two languages. And then there's Onomatopoeia, the meaning of which is impossible to completely convey across languages. A doctor once told me, "You have Onomatopoitis." I quickly replied, "What's that?!". He said, "It's just what it sounds like." :-O And then there's also humor, which is very difficult to bring across the linguistic chasm of SL to DL. I tried that once to an audience of people from, perhaps, a dozen different countries. It didn't work well. I know of no Bible translations which try to convey the humor evident in some stories. For example, the reference to constipation in 2 Corinthians 6:12 is funny, but how do you translate that?

Some languages have prepositions, some have lots of prepositions, some have few, some have none. However, the meaning conveyed by prepositions needs to work across these languages. Some languages have rhetorical questions, some don't; some use chiastic and inclusio structures, some don't. Some languages do not have adverbs. Bontok in the Philippines uses context and syntax to convey the adverbial function English associates with adverbs.

Further complexity of cognitive processing

Lastly, the brain processes language via several steps. The first part to process, the Primary Auditory Cortex, processes the sounds. This part becomes tuned to the sounds of your language. That's why when listening to a language you don't know, or you don't know well, the speakers appear to be speaking fast. This part of the brain isn't really engaged in processing a foreign language. I once asked a Chinese person to explain to me the different tonal elements of their language (identical words, spoken with a different tone, have different meanings). She had a very pronounced Chinese accent. I couldn't hear the distinction in the tones as she illustrated the difference. That is, my Primary Auditory Cortex was not tuned to Manderin even though it was obvious to her. In other words, the actual cognitive processing of language is complex, and it is tuned to one's mother tongue. Processing a foreign language, one that the hearer is not fluent in, requires the brain to do expensive lookups. So, the semantic associations are not readily available.

Conclusion

The purpose of the Tower of Babel event was to put a new universal system in place that then required people to love in order to achieve. That is, instead of unity being fully supported by a single language which had supported coherent meaning (ie truth), unity now fully needs an active spirituality. With the achievement (some might say conquest) of technology, this new system is eroding.

Admittedly, we do not know the number of languages created and which would have been among the artisans and workers who were called off of constructing the Tower of Babel. There are over 7,000 languages today, many of them related. Languages have also gone extinct. So, I think the creation of several hundred languages would not be beyond question. The complexity of language (and communication) as shown above, coupled with the existence of several hundred languages, would have presented an extensive challenge. A challenge that would have taken an extensive amount of resources to overcome. I suggest it did not take long for factions to significantly develop. After all, the creation of disunity was precisely the reason God did what he did. After that, it obviously would not have worked. The obviousness of not working would explain why no one addressed the possibility of continuing. People just didn't get along.

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¹Ambiguity can either refer to something like a pun, where multiple meanings come together to clarify the author's point, or it can mean the lack of clarity. Both were evident in our conversation.

²This expectation was based on a Code Model of human communication, one that has now been shown to be wrong; see the section *The Code Model* in this book. Also, Inferential Models appear to have a much better explanation. Sperber and Wilson's Relevance Theory provides one such explanation of an Inferential Model.

³I recently provided my own English translation of John 14 to Grammarly for it to offer suggestions to style the English. It reworded a verse, providing back to me the literal translation! The neural network had been trained with Bible translations which hold to a word-for-word translation process. What's ironic is that Grammarly did not follow standard English idiom. The literal translation of the verse is not English.

⁴This would be the ideal place to bring in Semiotics, the science of signs. By 'signs' I'm not referring to something one might see along side a road. I'm referring to the symbol that points to the meaning. The technical terms are signifier and signified. See Ferdinand de Saussure.

⁵I believe this is intentional, intentioned by God himself. The reason is relevant to the Tower of Babel story since communication, because of the complexity, requires the interlocutors to choose a unifying attitude. And to be clear here, unity does not infer a lack of disagreement. In fact, it requires it.

Answer 2

The Tower of Babel story is Genesis 11:1-9 - https://biblehub.com/esv/genesis/11.htm

The authorship might be ~540BC. Nimrod hasn't been matched to a particular historical figure, but Josephus attempted to work it out in the 1st Century AD and his guess can be placed to ~2000BC. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nimrod)

Which gives the first answer: they didn't know!

They knew the difference between history and legend, and this is far enough into legend that they want to keep the bits that might have passed down accurately, try not to over-embellish them, and (most importantly) draw out the lesson from it.

Although we don't know which authors and when, the overall tradition was continuous, and capable of astonishing accuracy. My favourite example is a seal they found dated to ~800BC with "property of the Prophet Isaiah" - https://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/news/prophet-isaiah-signature-jerusalem/

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Which leads into a second answer: then as now the truth of the Babel story is the immediate and universal experience: people can't understand each other. The concept doesn't need to be plodded through by characters, like in an Isaac Asimov novel.

Which leads to a third answer: as well as never being able to understand each other, it's also universal that we're still trying. And that's where the story gains a claim to divine truth.

I couldn't find a good source online for the (notable) modern art painting below, which is by Christian Bonnefoi sometime in the 1990s. It's about 20' high and creates an effect that the lines are trying to find a way round the fact they're all in different styles and mediums, to create a picture of the Tower.

Which is evidence that the author gave the enduring and inspiring explanation of human language in terms of its distance from God's language. We should credit him with having composed and edited in the way he thought best.

Answer 3

There may have been attempts to learn each other's languages, but most people wouldn't have been able to master 70 languages. Therefore, one still would not have been able to communicate with most of the people around, leading to chaos.