Language, Religion, & Chants of Sennaar

God didn't just take everyone's ability to communicate with each other. Speech is the foundation of thought. So, he quite literally took away everyone's ability to THINK. That's terrifying. Great video.

Great video. It really impresses how you can make mundane activities like foreign translation sound interesting. That bit about Montreal bridges and highways from SNW was a banger. This game sounds really cool since to solve the puzzles the player has to discard their own thought processes and see things from an alternative POV. The only other game that requires this is the old Lucasarts PC game The Dig. Its plot is three astronauts in an alien world and need to understand the bizarre technology to get back home. Very neat game. Steven Spielberg was the main creative source. The Tower of Babel fable is interesting if you look at it from an anthropologist perspective. A one-language society that stays isolated and never spreads out can forget their native tongue. It's called First Language Attrition and has happened to cultures like indigenous tribes in the Americas and Australia. There is even some evidence that it happened in Belgium. The best way to preserve languages is to spread out and encounter foreign lands. This does become funny if you imagine God as less a holy being of absolute good and more a genius teacher who's frustrated his students won't listen to Him and end up ruining everything. No wonder He gets so upset.

loved that game

While I was brought up a practicing Catholic (altar boy and all that), I agree with you that the god of the Old Testament is an authoritarian prick. Your interpretation of this game as a reinterpretation of the story of Babel and as a redemptive correction of God’s mistake is spot on. Keep up the good work. And any religious person who finds this video offensive is full of themselves.

Great Vid. A small fun-fact on the whole 'Impure' bit, It's really curious to see how the warrior glyph for 'impure' consists of a combination of an upside-down 'human' glyph (the Y, found in all their glyphs for people. 'warrior' for example is a Y with a sword) and their glyph for 'death', which has led to speculations in the community that there might have been a zombie-plague at the Abbey at some point.

Looks like a cool game. Another interesting video mate!

God is dead? Damn, Jimmy should have been named Friedrich

So, at 17:45 I think there's a bit of a conflation of two things going on. Language and writing. You're unequivocably right to say that there's no reason to believe that humanity ever had a unified writing system. We're reasonably confident that writing was independently invented at least 4 times: Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Chinese, and Mesoamerican. But linguists like to separate writing systems from language, and the history of language is much cloudier. Linguists are reasonably confident tracing languages back to a handful of proto languages. Languages as wide as English and Hindi all trace back to proto-Indo-European, for example; while the Korean language family consists only of languages spoken in the Korean peninsula, islands off the peninsula's coast, and northeast China, and has no known relation to any other language (this despite its writing system being related to the Chinese one). And the language of the Basque people in northern Spain is a language isolate, with no known relation to any other language anywhere in the world. But tracing the origin of these proto-languages is much harder. With Korean in particular there are some hypotheses tying it to Japanese, some Mongolian languages, and even Turkish; but this is a very controversial and not well-supported hypothesis. Some theories suggest human language traces back to before the Homo sapiens evolved, and others say it evolved comparatively recently in human evolution, but before humans left Africa. Both of these theories would suggest that in some sense actually yes, there was a time when all humans spoke the same language. Other theories are more conducive to the idea that there was never a time when humans spoke the same language. But anyway, it's an area of study that's not taken very seriously in linguistics, more because of a lack of ability to perform any analysis that provides meaningful results, than because of a strong reason to believe in or against the theory. It's actually an interesting point in the context of this game, because from what you've shown, it seems you mostly are interacting with the language purely through writing. But is the fact that the symbols are shown at the end to have come from a common source necessarily a sign the languages are related? The Chinese character 山 and Japanese character 山, and even the Korean hanja character 山 are all obviously the same symbol, and in all three languages it means "mountain". But the three languages are entirely unrelated to each other; it's mostly just the writing system that was borrowed and adapted. Though the Korean word for mountain, written in hangul as 산 and pronounced "san" is pretty obviously a loanword from Chinese "shan" (Japanese "yama" is, I suspect, unrelated). So the point that the game is trying to make at the very end there seems not to work, if you look at it too closely. Dissecting frogs, I guess. So umm. Yeah. The fact that I wrote that all out is a pretty good sign that this game would absolutely be interesting to me. Except for the fact that I don't especially enjoy puzzle gaming. But I really enjoyed this video about it, and I reckon I would enjoy a much, much more detailed review/analysis of it with more focus specifically on the linguistics.

hey beaver boy it's me again (: do u play with your toy cars ever?

The English language is a punishment from god 😂😂😂