Linguistics: Alpha and Omega

My interest in linguistics is beginning to swell. I have been glancing over the Wikipedia page on Phoenician, learning all sorts of valuable insights into the roots and subsequent growths of written language. For example, I did not know that both Greek and Cyrillic script (Russian alphabet) are both from Phoenician stock. From the Greek then came the Latin alphabet, which is the primary alphabet used in the Western Hemisphere (English, German, Romance languages). There are two things I noticed, while reading the article, that I feel are worth mentioning.

First, a personal insight that is founded solely on my own, mostly unimportant, coincidental connection between two texts:

The Wikipedia page lays out the Phoenician alphabet, along with its equivalents in Hebrew, Syriac, Arabic, South Arabic (which looks extremely different from the Arabic), Ge'ez (I don't know what this is, and it just gives a series of useless Unicode boxes for translation), Greek, Latin, and finally Cyrillic. Additionally, the table shows the Phoenician word that was associated with each letter. I found it fascinating to note that "ʾālep: ox" and "ʿayin: eye" were the Phoenician progenitors of the Greek derivatives "Alpha" and "Omega." In Revelation 22:13 it reads: "I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the last." With some teaspoons of extrapolation and a fair dose of imagination, it may be seen that God is the Ox and the Eye, which are often seen as symbols for power and knowledge/wisdom. Therefore, the omnipotent attribute of God is seen in the meaning of Alpha/Ox (like an Alpha-male animal), while the omniscient attribute is described in the Omega/Eye.

Purely linguistic speculation, I found these connections due to my motivation, boredom, and my resources, memories of scriptures I had read. It was like a language-y Easter-egg hunt for me.

The second, more universal insight, and one that is founded in much more scholarly research, not to mention deductive common sense, is the following: Multiple languages have evolved from a common stock, a central stem. The thesis is a very basic one, but is intriguing to me nonetheless when it is compared to its cousins in the other fields of research.

When I picture a diagram of this fanning-out of language in my head, I picture a Darwinian tree of evolution. At the bottom there are the single-celled organisms. At the top there are millions of off-shoots, with a myriad of multi-cellular complexities. I imagine the organization and specialization of humanity to be made of much the same stuff. At the start of humanity, there was really just the one occupation: hunter-gatherer. As civilization began to aggregate, individuals devoted themselves towards a single area of expertise: farming grain, tanning animal hides, exchanging money. The same temporal dispersion holds true in chemistry. At the start of the universe there were only a few chemical elements, but as entropy took its course, more elements with more protons and neutrons formed. Finally, compounds began to form. Eventually, certain experts of those compounds made this computer I am typing at, allowing me to relay this message.

So the evolution of language partakes in the same model of evolution, the same model of child-bearing and multiplication. However, our globalization seems to be curbing, and perhaps even reversing that trend. Lots of languages seem to be dying out. Many smaller languages are becoming increasingly irrelevant, becoming either subsumed or entirely ignored by larger languages. I am not moralizing either way on whether or not this bodes well or ill for the future. Rather, for myself it is simply a very interesting shift in the evolution of language.

Perhaps in the future, instead of having a multiplication of languages, we will have a unification of languages into an end-all language of universal comprehension. The very term "language barrier" will be employed only in historical contexts. On the other hand, perhaps there will be a second Tower of Babel event. It may be that all of the languages will coalesce into such an easy and free parlance, that our civilization itself will not have the terminology to maintain itself; our laziness could send us spirally over the edge of linguistic equilibrium.

However, I think the more probable future would be one in which we hold onto the remnants of nearly-forgotten languages. The task is already being done, and it is being done entirely intentionally. The linguistic mutations of the past were sporadic and formed to serve the immediate purposes of their users. However, the linguistic evolution and maintenance of the future is and will be done with a deliberate hand and eye.

In addition, the old multiplication of language still continues, only in a different venue. The digital world, as well as the landscapes of science, architecture, and other growing fields, create neologisms constantly. Computer languages abound today, promising to grow in the future. It seems that, in the 21st century, they have burst forth like a sac of spider eggs. Their offspring have had plenty of software to cook up and commercialize.

Languages, despite dying out in some places, are being reborn in others. The possibilities for languages remain bright. In the classical condition of spoken and hand-written language that many traditional linguists relish, the drying up of many useless languages (curbed of course by intentional efforts of archiving them) seems inevitable. But the boundless capacity for all things to become reborn in something new and great? The new frontiers that are utilizing language itself is unprecedented ways? It is hard to believe that those concepts will ever die away; language will always revive itself in some new way.