BABEL, QUITE A TOWER [PART ONE]

LA TOUR DE BABEL

1 The whole world spoke the same language, using the same words.

2 While men were migrating in the east, they came upon a valley in the land of Shinar and settled there.
3 They said to one another, "Come, let us mold bricks and harden them with fire." They used bricks for stone,     and bitumen for mortar.
4 Then they said, "Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the sky, and so make a name for ourselves; otherwise we shall be scattered all over the earth."
5 The LORD came down to see the city and the tower that the men had built.
6 Then the LORD said: "If now, while they are one people, all speaking the same language, they have started to do this, nothing will later stop them from doing whatever they presume to do.
7 Let us then go down and there confuse their language, so that one will not understand what another says."
8 Thus the LORD scattered them from there all over the earth, and they stopped building the city.
Before I get started, let me ask you if it looks to you like God was a little confused in His old age.  Look at what verse 5 says and then what verse 7 says.  The Bible is full of this kind of stuff.  Someday I'm going to write a humorous book about God's Alzheimer's condition.

One of my favorites is when the All Knowing, All seeing, All powerful God goes down into the Garden and asks, "Where are you"? (Gen. 3;9)
Or my other favorite, when God "...remembered Noah and all the animals in the ark..."(Gen. 8;1)  Sheesh!  Who put Him in charge?
Hey, get back to the Tower if Babel.  

Oh, yeah, I forgot.  I was too busy remembering that God forgets too..."

Anyway, the question is, how many of you have had to learn a language that you knew nothing about going in?  Raise your hands, boys and girls.  Hhmmm, just what I thought.  Lots o' fun, ain't it?  I suppose it can be tough trying to learn a language without being in the country where the lingo is spoken, written and thought in all the time.  I tried that, five times.  Once with German and once with Japanese.  In the German class I lasted for three sessions.  For the Japanese class I lasted for two.  Great record!  See Latin, Hebrew and Greek below.

As far as I am concerned, language classes are the worst waste of time invented by humans, ever.  Except for the teachers.  You know, the ones who take your money knowing full well that you'll never dominate the tongue until you go to Japan.
Then there are the seven years of book-learnin' Latin and the six years of the same for Greek and the four years of Hebrew.   I learned more Latin in the first six months of listening to Latin in a classroom and answering when I was called on than I did in the entire seven years of book-learnin '.  I'm still fairly good in Latin.  Even wrote a blog post or two in Latin to ridicule the bozos who shout and scream because they want Latin Masses.  I wonder why they never submitted comments?

I did get something out of Greek.  I still know the alphabet and I know several words.  I still have to resort to sign language for the call of nature, though.  Oh, yeah!  
Hebrew was fun, really fun.  Nothing serious there.  I mean, come' on!  A language with NO VOWELS?!?**  So I kidded myself through four years and I can't remember 5 of the 24 characters in the Hebrew alphabet.
Now, in Italian, I did better.  First, "Coca-Cola" was easy to learn.  The tough part there is that "Coca-Cola" is of the feminine gender in Italian.  Second, the writing is the same as ours, and, there are only 22 letters, vowels included.  BUT, they have an extra consonant, "gl" and it took me slightly more than two years to master it.  Don't believe the clowns who tell you that Italian is "easy".

Of course it is easy if all you want to say is "Passa mi la pasta, per favore."  To get beyond that and to be able to speak in public and to write grammatical Italian is one eye-bulging heavy lift.  Oh, by the way, I still remember the Italian alphabet.
Spanish has been a challenge.  24 letters, including the famous "ll" which is not 10% the challenge of the Italian "gl" but you have to understand that it does not come in the same section as "l" in the dictionary.  The killer in Spanish is the mastering of the verb forms.  I thought French was bad.  Spanish puts French verbs to shame.  Now that I have had to stop drinking alcohol, I have forgotten all the Spanish I ever knew.  When I speak Spanish, I still impress the daylights out of the listeners with the strange sounding words that come out of my mouth every now and again.  They sound Spanish, but they are really Italian words looking for equal time. 
Then there is Ilokano.  Ah, yes.  No verb "to be".  So you wind up talking like Yoda all the time.  "Nice girl." "Nice Girl?"  "NICE girl."  "Nice, Girl."  "Dog big."

"Dogmine." [Note the "mine" is not separated from "dog".]  One of my favorite stories about language has to do with Ilokano.  It's for when I explain how to become fluent.
Tagalog is a passive language for me.  I understand, but I do not speak well.  It does have the verb "to be."  By the way, Ilokano and Tagalog have the same way of writing that we do.  Both languages have about 24 letters [who cares?].  They, like Vietnamese, have the added consonant, "ng" and it has a different pronunciation value in all three of the above mentioned languages.  It took me a long time to master the Ilokano "ng".  I have never mastered anything in Tagalog.  I just mentioned Vietnamese because I wanted to appear smart and metro-sexual.
I'll get to part two later.  There I will philosophize about how to become fluent in a language that you know nothing about.

The sad thing is, God is getting even with us for thinking we are so smart, and we are still not believing that He's in charge. What a mess!  

See Bible quotes above.