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Language


2:19).
             Norse mythology preserves a similar story of divine participation in the creation of language, and in India the god Indra is said to have invented articulate speech. In the much more sophisticated debate on the nature and origin of language given in Plato's Socratic dialogue Cratylus, Socrates is made to speak of the gods as those responsible for first fixing the names of things in the proper way.
             A similar divine aura pervades early accounts of the origin of writing. The Norse god Odin was held responsible for the invention of the runic alphabet. The inspired stroke of genius whereby the ancient Greeks adapted a variety of the Phoenician consonantal script so as to represent the distinctive consonant and vowel sounds of Greek, thus producing the first alphabet such as is known today, was linked with the mythological figure Cadmus, who, coming from Phoenicia, was said to have founded Thebes and introduced writing into Greece. The Arabs had a traditional account of their script, together with the language itself, being given to Adam by God.
             The later biblical tradition of the Tower of Babel (Gen. 11:1-9) exemplifies three aspects of early thought about language: (1) divine interest in and control over its use and development, (2) a recognition of the power it gives to man in relation to his environment, and (3) an explanation of linguistic diversity, of the fact that people in adjacent communities speak different and mutually unintelligible languages, together with a survey of the various speech communities of the world known at the time to the Hebrews.
             The origin of language has never failed to provide a subject for speculation, and its inaccessibility adds to its fascination. Informed investigations of the probable conditions under which language might have originated and developed are seen in the late-18th-century essay of the German philosopher Johann Gottfried von Herder, "Abhandlung uber den Ursprung der Sprache- ("Essay on the Origin of Language-), and in numerous other treatments.


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