The Tower of Babel

The Holy Bible was written by humans inspired by God, and it has meaning today and tomorrow. It never changes, and what was once freaky and weird is starting to eerily make some sense. The Tower of Babel Genesis 11 is historical. Some consider the Ziggurat at Eridu to be this tower of Babel. It is of no doubt that the Tower of Babel was in Messopotamia, the problem, of course, is that many of these massive structures were ravaged to build others. I've read as high as 50 ziggurats. Regardless, the structure stood at one point in the land of Shinar.

The effect of the Tower of Babel is that language diverges. God introduced this phenomenon. That's why (for example) an Urban-American likely won't make sense of the spoken words of a Creole-American, and the rest of us have trouble with both. If French, Italian, Spanish, and English are all Romansch languages, (as in, Romans gave us the root: Latin), going back further in time, there were fewer languages. I, with my California roots, often intentionally mix some trite Spanish expressions into what I say. Compound that with the odd cross-section of mid-western words (pop, not soda, for example) and a very mild case of Minnesotan accent, and I've ended up in a peculiar corner of English. Give me enough time and may I raise up a nation through my children, and an exchange on the order of:

You want to come with for dinner, dontcha? Steve caught a grande' walleye, Amigo.

Human language divergence point made, if a bit forced.

Enter computer languages! Computer languages do not require social acceptance to exist. In fact, all they require to become prevalent is financing. IBM has kept REXX alive decades longer than prudent, and the mere existence of vbscript is a testimony to Microsoft's die-hard attitude about languages they make. Ten years ago, Markup Languages did not exist in vast numbers; I think it was only SGML and HTML. Now, XML has spawned a rebirth of dialecting. I used to think there were 100 programming languages (loose sense of the word programming). Now, knowing more than 30, counting all the proprietary languages (such as the command scripting of a Cisco router), I'd guess there are beyond 1000 computer languages. Twice that if you count versions and revisions.

Every once in a while, someone comes around and decides it is time to try to converge. Esperanto ring a bell? There's also a son-of-Esperanto, Ido. I believe someone said that Ada was to be a computer language convergence. My study of it suggests that they tried: a little of everything.

As humans, we need to be aware of this phenomenon. If it ever goes away in my lifetime, that with several dozen other reasons would suggest that the end of the world is nigh!

Since this is my introduction to web chronicling, I'd like to point out that I claim Vexar as my own 'net name. I was Vexar in late 1991 as an email address at my first college of attendance, pre-dating the use by countless others as a personal identity. Does it predate the trademarked orange fencing? Probably not. A dear friend of mine pulled the name off the side of a Revell plastic model, back in the years when computers were running at or below 1Mhz; this suggests commonality as both are plastic. Perhaps it is a fitting name for a space ship of war, when taken in the original Esperanto.

Subsequent to this claim, I have attracted a challenge to its use. Victor Mercieca, who is likely of Russian origin, debates that his original naming, Vexzar (a Russian hybridized word), predates my own use. However, Victor has yet to provide historical evidence of its use prior to 1991, and uses only a homonym, with an Americanized spelling adjustment. The debate continues...