"Language is not an abstract construction of the learned, or of dictionary makers, but is something arising out of the work, needs, ties, joys, affections, tastes, of long generations of humanity, and has its bases broad and low, close to the ground."
In the Bible, God seemed to want to make a point about the world’s languages. It was put right up front and center, in Genesis 11:1-9 (English Standard Version):
1. Now the whole earth had one language and the same words.
2. And as people migrated from the east, they found a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there.
3. And they said to one another, "Come, let us make bricks, and burn them thoroughly." And they had brick for stone, and bitumen for mortar.
4. Then they said, "Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be dispersed over the face of the whole earth."
5. And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of man had built.
6. And the Lord said, "Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language, and this is only the beginning of what they will do. And nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them.
7. "Come, let us go down and there confuse their language, so that they may not understand one another’s speech."
8. So the Lord dispersed them from there over the face of all the earth, and they left off building the city.
9. Therefore its name was called Babel, because there the Lord confused the language of all the earth. And from there the Lord dispersed them over the face of all the earth.
Whether or not one believes this as literal truth, the Internet is perhaps "un-dispersing" humanity’s languages by reconstituting them under one virtual roof at Wikipedia.
Marshall McLuhan once noted this aspect, saying, "Language as the technology of human extension, whose powers of division and separation we know so well, may have been the ‘Tower of Babel’ by which men sought to scale the highest heavens. Today computers hold out the promise of a means of instant translation."48
Most Wikipedia stories in the press tend to cover the English edition, but choose almost any other language and the story gets even more interesting and the effects more profound. We may compare the merits of Wikipedia against established print encyclopedias, but for many languages of the world, Wikipedia is the only encyclopedia in that native tongue. This is something many Wikipedia critics often fail to grasp.
Hiding in plain view on the side of the screen for any Wikipedia page is the area of Interwiki links. It’s a list of other languages in which the current article has a version. By placing a short language code at the end of a given article, a link is created to the same topic in another language edition. For example, the page for [[Internet]] has listed among its Interwiki links:
Languages
As we will see, different language versions sometimes mean a direct translation of another language, but Wikipedia users were encouraged to go their own way and interpret the subject in light of community and cultural norms.
