The Tower of Babel

I love languages. Probably, some of this love stems from the fact that we spoke 2 languages at home, and I was exposed to 2 more languages quite early in life. But 3 of the 4 languages I knew were Indian, and 2 of them South Indian - so obviously they had similarities. My first exposure to a non-Indian language was when I started learning French. It was during this period that I stumbled upon connections between French and Indian languages - and marvelled at the wonder of the links.

A shirt is "chemize" in French, a baggy top is "kameez" in Hindi. Bread is "Pain" (pronounced "paan" without stressing the last "n") in French - And wow, it is "pao" in Hindi. Brother in English is so similar to the Sanskrit "Bhraatha" and the root for "patriarch" and "pitha" must be the same. Lufthansa, the German airlines, literally means "flying bird". "Hamsa" in Sanskrit is a bird - swan. The name for numbers also point a close connection - Septa, the Latin root for 7, which is "Sapta" in Sanskrit - if we start looking, what we find might be just too amazing. I guess most of these connections would have been spoken about and researched by etymologists across the world. My thrill and amazement at these links is proabably more due to the fact that I discovered them through serendipity. But there are certain bizarre similarities - In colloquial Tamil, the "kiddie" word for water is "akkam". I had heard kids saying that all my life, but when my daughter started said that word one of these days, it struck me that it was so close to "aqua", the Latin root for water. Was this a real connection or was this coincidence?

If you look up Wikipidea on the Tower of Babel, it says "According to the narrative in Genesis Chapter 11 of the Bible, the Tower of Babel was a tower built by a united humanity to reach the heavens. God, observing the unity of humanity in the construction, resolves to destroy the tower and confuse the previously uniform language of humanity, thereby preventing any such future efforts." I don't know if this story is for real, but somehow, like a lot of things in mythology, it does seem to make some sense.

If you would like to look at the connections between words in different languages, here is a nice site that discusses the origin of words and how they appear across languages - www.takeourword.com.