Glossolalia
I honestly believe that none of the explanations proposed for glossolalia are correct. That is, it is neither supernatural nor complete gibberish. There is indeed evidence that the human brain is hardwired to recognize language.....So I played you a recording of a spoken language you neither knew nor had ever heard in your entire life, you would immediately recognize that you are hearing an actual language despite not understanding the meaning of what you're hearing. That being said, there is also mounting evidence that just as all modern human ethnic groups have a common ancestor, so do all human languages. And so this brings us back to glossolalia. My hypothesis is that glossolalia is indeed a language, and it is the most ancient human language that is the ancestor of all languages living and dead. After all, language isn't just something that we learn, it is an actual instinct. How this primitive language is retained in our genetic memory, and in some part of our brain though, is indeed a mystery. Any thoughts? ![]()
Language in general probably is an instinct in humans.
And all modern humans maybe descended from a relatively small tribe that had a common language one to two hundred thousand years ago.
Glossolalia has been studied and compared - tongue speakers in different cultures and different religions ( christian sects and pagan sects)- have been observed and compared.
But if you're saying that an entire foriegn language- with its vocabulary of thousands of words, and grammar, and syntax, is locked in our brain and dictated by our DNA- then thats highly unlikely to be true. We are not likely born carrying a webster's dictionary of a forgotten language in our heads.
Glossolalia is thought to be a psuedolanguage in which people spout sounds that are grouped into pauses, and groups of sounds resembling words and sentences that resembles real language in general. But nothing is communicated, and it never resembles any specific known language living or dead. Your suggesting that tongue speakers the world over are all speaking the same UNknown language from the distant past.
But the sounds people spout- the vowels and consonants they use- are always derived from their native tongue. English vowels and consonsants are not quite the same as Swedish or Cantonese vowels and consonants. But English tongue speakers use English vowels and consonsants- and cantonese cantonese - and so on.
Its your own language put through a blender. you're not really spouting an alien tongue.
And tongue speakers around the world are all doing the same- making a pouree of their own native tongue. If tongue speakers in the USA and in Canton were (a) producing sounds alien to their own language, but producing sounds similiar to EACH OTHER- then that would be evidence of something like what you are proposing. But apparently no investigator has observed that.
Many years ago I saw a nature show about how bird songs are both learned and innate.
Songbirds are born with a template of thier own species' song which is distinct from that of other species' songs.
But its a dumbed down version of the song we hear them sing.
Raised in isolation or with the wrong species of bird the birds grow up to sing the dumb simple template version. But in the wild they learn the "local dialect" of their species song from their parents and their neighbors. That song is a local complex fleshing out of the template version of the song. And it varies from place to place within the same bird species.
So is it possible that humans have the same thing?
Its possible but it would work much the same way- we might have an innate capacity not only for language - but even have some basic simple linguist rules embedded in our brains at birth. But we would not be born with a whole full blown language in our heads.
In fact there is even some evidence for something like a linguistic template in our heads.
For example all known languages have words that are kinda noun-like, and have other words that are kinda verb-like.
Also- though living languages vary markedly in word order ( subject-verb-object, verb-subject-object, object-verb-subject, etc) there does seem to be a "default setting" built in for subject-verb-object ( like English). Tribal languages of subsaharan Africa vary in word order but when african slaves were thrown together and forced to create pidgin hybrid languages to survive- the pidgins and creoles they created were inevitably subject-verb-object.
So we may be born with a need to divide the world into things and actions, and have a preference for saying "I kicked the ball" unless Mom and Dad teach us to say "kicked ball I". But thats hardly the same as having a whole webster's unabridged locked in our brains.
I think (believe? guess?) that most of the people who babble on in those congregations truly believe that all the others are doing it for real and so fake it to not stand out in the crowd. They believe that some spirit has grabbed all the others, and don't want to be the only one left out. So you have a room full of people who fake it, thinking they're the only one.
Nobody has ever found even a hint of a real language, and most of it is so stupid I'm sure pretty much everybody are secretly ashamed.
For a horrific example of how children are manipulated, see the documentary Jesus Camp.
