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The Thursday section of this week's lesson takes a very brief look at the story of the Tower of Babel, which I think deserves a lot more notice. But in tune with the brief reference, I would merely note that there is some interesting linguistic support for the biblical record.
There is a process in linguistic science called historical reconstruction, in which known historical shifts in pronunciation are traced backwards in an effort to determine the parent form of two or more cognates. For example, by reference to the First Germanic Sound Shift, the absorption of vowels from ending into the stem, and other historical artifacts, it is possible to show that the English word "feet" is directly descended from a word <podi>, which appears in essentially that form in ancient Greek. Thus modern English and ancient Greek are believed to belong to the same language tree, and it is possible, by comparison with other languages, to postulate a time line when the parent language split into separate dialects. By similar comparison of cognates in a number of different languages it is possible to construct a family tree of languages which is reasonably reliable.
As an extended example (to over simplify an extremely complex process): compare hound (English) hund (German) hund (Swedish) cwn (Welsh) can (Spanish) canis (Latin) kyon (Greek) keleb (Hebrew). From this list it would appear that English, German and Swedish are closely related, Welsh, Spanish, Latin and Greek are related but somewhat more distantly, and Hebrew more distantly yet, if at all.
The way this relates to the Tower of Babel is that linguists have been able to trace all world languages for which we have adequate historical records back to the Anatolian highlands (eastern Turkey) at about 4000 B.C.
Linguistic reconstructions being sometimes as much art as science, there is room for some slipping and sliding in that conclusion, both in terms of area and of date, but I think it is significant that a strictly secular science has landed in substantial support of a biblical story which often has been regarded as a myth.
