Dec 19th - The Tower of Babel

I've been reading The Last Lingua Franca by Nicholas Ostler.  It's a fascinating book.  I haven't finished it yet but it's got me thinking about the obsolescence of Linguas Franca which is I'm sure the premise of this book.

What's a Lingua Franca? Originally a form of communication used in the Levant, a stripped-down Italian peppered with Spanish, French, Greek, Arabic, and Turkish words. The name is probably from the Arabic custom, dating back to the Crusades, of calling all Europeans Franks.   Online Etymology Dictionary, © 2010 Douglas Harper

So now I hear some of you asking what is the Levant?  The term Levant, which first appeared in English in 1497, originally meant the East in general. It is borrowed from the French word levant 'rising', that is, the point where the sun rises.  

 The Levant is the area around the eastern Mediterranean; from Turkey to northern Africa and eastward to Iran; the site of such ancient civilizations as Phoenicia and Babylon and Egypt and the birthplace of Judaism and Christianity and Islam.  From theFreeDictionary.com

There have been many Linguas Franca in the history of our world.... there was perhaps the very first Lingua Franca, the language used by the ancient survivors of the Great Flood to build the Tower of Babel in the land of Shinar.  According to the biblical account, a united human race of the generations following the biblical Great Flood, speaking a single language and migrating from the east, came to the land of Shinar, where they resolved to build a city with a tower "with its top in the heavens...lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the Earth." God came down to see what they did and said: "They are one people and have one language, and nothing will be withholden from them which they purpose to do." So God said, "Come, let us go down and confound their speech." And so God scattered them upon the face of the Earth, and confused their languages, and they left off building the city, which was called Babel "because God there confounded the language of all the Earth."(Genesis 11:5-8).

If you are a follower of the Christian Bible we've been "babbling" ever since.  Oh we've gotten together over time - first there was the language of the Levant, then Latin, then French and now English.  I've probably skipped a few in the middle but you get the idea.  Learned people and tradesmen around the world of the day feel the need to communicate with each other and choose a language to do so with. The current leader of the common world usually gets to choose the language.

But... with the vast use of computers these days do we really need a Lingua Franca?  After all, the machines translate for us.  I communicate with my past foreign exchange students on Facebook using Google's translator.  You can buy a handheld translator so you don't need to learn Chinese or Slovakian or.... whatever language of the country you're travelling in at the moment.

So is the human race finally recreating that Tower of Babel - this time in the form of a machine?  If you believe in God, what will he do?  Destroy the machinery so that we are back to being unable to do "anything which we purpose to do."  Or if your an agnostic, an atheist, a follower of other religions and thoughts, is that what is happening to the world? Are we facing our own destruction brought on by angry weather and angry people and an angry planet? Will we be scattered around the world, with our machines blown out by bombs, or earthquakes, or storms or tsunamis and have to rebuild our civilization all over again, over centuries, only to have the same destruction fall upon us when we think we've finally almost reached the pinnacle of the new Tower of Babel of the age?