Tower of Babel, languages around the world The Tower of Babel will help you to get what's making languages appealing, be them forsaken or still in use, be them natural or formal, using several points of view, scientific, cultural or historical.

Tower of Babel, Pieter Brugel, 1563 Tower of Babel, Pieter Brugel, 1563 Natural languages The well known biblic myth of Babel tells us that the diversity of tongues is actually a punishment of God, because of mankind who dares to challenge Thy. Yet this variety represents one of the greatest wealth of mankind, and this site tries to make a good introduction to this. It's quite difficult to produce a complete picture of the situation because there currently are from 5,000 to 10,000 languages, depending on the meaning we give to the word "language".
Nevertheless, we'll try by dividing them into 4 categories, reachable through the navigation bar at the top of the page by the "Natural Languages" entry:

Dead languages, here we'll deal with the 1st writing systems we know of,
Indo-european languages, putting together romance, germanic and slavic tongues,
Afro-asiatic languages, including among others the semitic tongues (Arabic and Hebrew),
Eastern languages, a section containing the other great languages families, as the sino-tibetan one.

In the overall, webpages are organized following linguistic classification. However, there’s another way to reach any language – maybe – in an easier way: through any country that officially uses it by looking up in the world map, whose link is located in the menu bar at the bottom of the page.

The tower of Babel.

Now the whole world had one language and a common speech.

As men moved eastward, they found a plain in Shinar and settled there.

They said to each other, "Come, let's make bricks and bake them thoroughly." They used brick instead of stone, and tar for mortar.

Then they said, "Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves and not be scattered over the face of the whole earth."

But the LORD came down to see the city and the tower that the men were building.

The LORD said, "If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them.

Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other."

So the LORD scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city.

That is why it was called Babel -because there the LORD confused the language of the whole world. From there the LORD scattered them over the face of the whole earth.

The Bible Genesis 11:1-9 Formal languages Mind is the foundry of mental contents, language conveys meaning. But the resulting meaning often shifts from the initial thought because of lack of accuracy or of appropriate word. So, man has tried to overcome all the drawbacks coming from natural languages, step by step. Indeed, by looking back at the long run of humanity through ages, we can spot the fact that lately its evolving world has become entirely dependant of quickly expanding scientific advances and technical benefits coming along. This could have been done thanks to the fact that accurate and efficient means of communication, formal languages, have come to life and have been standardized internationally, taking in mathematics as a framework. If we want to understand how our world has taken its current shape, it's best to know stuff about formal languages and scientific concepts. So, here, we'll deal with them following 3 scientific fields:

Mathematics, which have reached a high abstract level,
Physics, which relies on mathematics abstraction and a set of concepts, linking its theories to reality,
Computer science, whose foundations come from mathematics undertakings of the 1930s.

Physical concepts are free creations of the human mind, and are not, however it may seem, uniquely determined by the external world. In our endeavor to understand reality we are somewhat like a man trying to understand the mechanism of a closed watch. He sees the face and the moving hands, even hears its ticking, but he has no way of opening the case. If he is ingenious he may form some picture of a mechanism which could be responsible for all the things he observes, but he may never be quite sure his picture is the only one which could explain his observations. He will never be able to compare his picture with the real mechanism and he cannot even imagine the possibility or the meaning of such a comparison. But he certainly believes that, as his knowledge increases, his picture of reality will become simpler and simpler and will explain a wider and wider range of his sensuous impressions. He may also believe in the existence of the ideal limit of knowledge and that it is approached by the human mind. He may call this ideal limit the objective truth.

The Evolution of Physics A. Einstein & L. Infeld, 1938 Cyril APAN