2421: Tower of Babel

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Tower of Babel

Title text: Soon, linguists will be wandering around everywhere, saying things like "colorless green ideas sleep furiously" and "more people have been to Russia than I have," and speech will become unintelligible.

Explanation

This explanation may be incomplete or incorrect: Created by a COLORLESS GREEN IDEA. Please mention here why this explanation isn't complete. Do NOT delete this tag too soon. If you can address this issue, please edit the page! Thanks.

The story of the Tower of Babel is the Biblical explanation for the existence of different languages in the world. In the story, humans endeavor to build a tower reaching heaven. Their arrogance angers God and prompts him to sabotage the project. He does this by "confounding their speech" (commonly interpreted as giving everyone their own language) inhibiting their ability to work together.

In this retelling, however, the tower is actually finished. God is happy to receive the human visitors, and offers them a reward.

The party that ascends to the top of the tower consists of Cueball, Megan and a third figure who might be linguist Gretchen McCulloch, previously seen in 2381: The True Name of the Bear. When Gretchen expresses her love of words, God offers to create a panoply of languages. Megan immediately sees the problems with this, but Gretchen is enthusiastic. In the original story of the Tower of Babel, the different human languages are framed as a punishment by God for working together to build the tower; here, they're presented as a satisfying additional challenge.

Phonology, a part of linguistics, is the study of the sound system used in a language or dialect, or of the systems that languages use to organize sounds. Morphosyntactic alignment is the grammatical relationship between the noun arguments to a verb — for example, between the two arguments (in English, the subject and object) of transitive verbs like the dog chased the cat, and the single argument of intransitive verbs like the cat ran away.

The title text presents two meaningless English-language phrases that illustrate the language's ability to convey confusing or paradoxical information. "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously", coined by linguist Noam Chomsky in 1957, is an example of a sentence that is structurally correct but contains paradoxes and meaningless comparisons: something cannot be both colorless AND green (see Invisible Pink Unicorn), ideas do not sleep, and sleeping is not generally done furiously. That said, the sentence "colorless green ideas sleep furiously" is so well known in linguistics that a competition to make the sentence meaningful was held in 1985 and attracted a number of entrants. "More people have been to Russia than I have" is a well-known example of comparative illusion. It sounds like it means something but, upon actual analysis, does not.

Trivia

In 2381: The True Name of the Bear, sentences spoken by Gretchen McCulloch do not have periods at their ends, a fact which she mentioned on Twitter. However, in this comic, she uses periods, so her previous periodlessness might be a coincidence and not a trait of her character on xkcd.

Transcript

This transcript is incomplete. Please help editing it! Thanks.

(Cueball, Gretchen McCulloch and Megan are standing at the base of the Tower of Babel)

Cueball: The Tower of Babel is complete!

Megan: Let's go meet God!

(Cueball, Gretchen McCulloch and Megan are now standing at the top of the Tower of Babel)

Cueball: Hi God!

God: Wow, nice tower!

God: You did a great job! I'm so proud!

Megan: Thanks!

God: I'm going to give you a reward.

God: What do you like about the world?

Gretchen McCulloch: Hmm. Words are really cool

Megan: No, wait-

God: Great! I'm going to give you lots of languages to study, each with its own phonology, word ordering, morphosyntactic alignment...

Gretchen McCulloch: YESSSSSS!

Megan: We should not have brought a linguist.

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Discussion

So is Gretchen McCulloch xkcd's resident linguist now? Is there going to be character page for her like Cory Doctorow? 172.68.129.136 23:00, 5 February 2021 (UTC)

I'm hoping so! We could call it "Gretchen McComics." 172.69.34.74 23:24, 5 February 2021 (UTC)

That's probably not in compliance with whatever stylebook we have here but I love it. Captain Video (talk) 04:24, 6 February 2021 (UTC)

Could it really be the same Gretchen? The time periods of the two comics are thousands of years apart. And the title text of "True Name of the Bear" says she was devoured. Barmar (talk) 06:31, 7 February 2021 (UTC)

Maybe it is meant to remind us of her from the other comic, but given the settings and no mention of her name, it cannot be determined that it is her. Great to include mention of the other comic in the explanation, but not in the transcript. Also it cannot be said that there is a real person in this comic (unless of course you think of God as a real person? But even if you consider him a person, then people may debate you on how real he is ;-) Have updated the transcript and categories. And no we should not make a category on her based on two comics, especially not when it is not clear it is her in this one. --Kynde (talk) 09:10, 8 February 2021 (UTC)

If there's a third comic with a linguist drawn like that, I'd suggest calling the character "Gretchen" as a convenient handle regardless of whether it is or isn't Gretchen McCulloch. --Pi one (talk) 02:32, 9 February 2021 (UTC)

Wait, how could a linguist exist before there were languages to study and compare? Is this the omphalos hypothesis popping up again? GreatWyrmGold (talk) 02:36, 6 February 2021 (UTC)

They have one language. Presumably, she attempts to thoroughly study that one. This would technically make her a grammarian, but since they don't have contact with any other language, this proto-language wouldn't need make any distinction between grammarians and linguists, so "linguist" would be an appropriate translation. --162.158.79.49 05:55, 6 February 2021 (UTC)

I think it is worth mentioning the paradox in the explanation. --Kynde (talk) 09:10, 8 February 2021 (UTC)

There's also the possibility that the word "linguist" didn't exist before that moment. "What the hell's a linguist?" "Who is hells?"

Very astute observation - I take it you are a cunning linguist? 141.101.104.35 20:51, 8 February 2021 (UTC)

Defining "colorless green ideas sleep furiously" {

   "colorless green ideas" existing is 0 .
   List of all existing "colorless green ideas"  that don't "dream furiously" contains 0 elements.
   True.

} 141.101.77.60 06:24, 6 February 2021 (UTC)

Defining "more people have been to Russia than I have" {

   if(Have "I" ever been to Russia?){
       "More than 1 people have been to Russia.".
   } else {
       "More than 0 people have been to Russia.".
   }

}, so something like {

   "At least 1 person that is not me has been to Russia.".

}. 141.101.77.60 06:24, 6 February 2021 (UTC)

"I possess a number of people as chattel", i.e. servants and/or slaves. (That number could be zero?) "The number of people who have gone to Russia exceeds this value." 141.101.77.168 10:29, 6 February 2021 (UTC)

What colour is invisible ink? --172.69.55.140 10:24, 9 February 2021 (UTC)

Any colour you wish, so long as its alpha is zero! Davidhbrown (talk)

Regarding this line: "A world with only one language would make travel and global communication much easier, but for those with an interest in linguistics, it would be deeply limiting, as there would be only one language to study."

It may be worth noting that this is actually one of the reasons why God is attributed with being upset at Babel and why language was confounded. An explanation I heard is that God was concerned that all humans being part of one language and one culture resulted in absolutism and stifled the variety of human culture that was intended (this relatively recent explanation compared the people building the tower to Soviet Russia), and so the adding of languages wasn't a punishment per se, but an enforced correction to bring society back to how it was "supposed" to be all along. I made an account to note this - I can note it in the explanation if desired. 172.70.131.84 17:01, 6 January 2023 (UTC) Noah

Is Randall mocking the linguists? 2659: Unreliable Connection (talk) 08:32, 29 March 2023 (UTC)