Damn Creationists, leave my science alone!

Now they've gone and done it: they've messed with linguistics. When they came for the biologists, I fought... so nevermind that train of thought.

Really, the Language Log entry does a good job of describing what's going on with a new wave of the Edenics phenomenon, which I thought was a rather unique or sporadic theological attack on science because of my Southern Baptist upbringing. But there are books, websites, and pages on Creationist Websites. From the book's author's website:

Here you will discover that ALL human words contain forms of the Edenic roots within them. These proto-Semitic or early Biblical Hebrew words were programmed into our common ancestors, Adam and Eve, before the language dispersion, or babble at the Tower of Babel -- which kickstarted multi-national human history. I congratulate you for investigating for yourself if language is an engineered miracle or merely the evolved gesturing of chimps.

Note that this author thinks that Hebrew is the source of English. Hypotheses like Edenics, i.e. the religious versions of the proto-world language theories, are based on two other hypotheses: Young Earth Creationism and the Tower of Babel As Origin of Language Diversity, a.k.a. Wrathful Dispersion. These religious theories of language origin and theories of language based on them are absolute shite for a variety of reasons, one of which is that living, breathing, speaking people have been around for longer than 6,000 years, much longer, and it's poppycock to think that everybody from the origin and spread of H. sapiens to the time of Babylon spoke the same language, especially when you look at extremely old populations like native Australians, who arrived, conservatively, 40,000 years ago, and who were geographically isolated when water covered the land bridge over which they could have traveled about 8,000 years ago. Also, the original, Edenic language would most definitely not be early Biblical Hebrew, which any cursory glance at a good history book's chapters on Mesopotamia and the preceding time would make damn clear (Sumerian, for example, doesn't fit into any language family, really, like Basque).

Just knowing how long Native Australians have lilved there is enough to dismiss Edenics out of hand, so while I want to read the Edenics book, I don't know if I'd have the patience. I should get it so I can address the phonology-type arguments he has, but, like I said, I don't know if I have the patience, and phonetics isn't a subject I get much joy from.