Babel

The Tower of Babel

The tale of the Tower of Babel, from Genesis 11: 1-9, is an "explanation" of why there are so many different languages. You can find the story in some of those languages by following the links below. Having a single text in a variety of languages is a good way to see similarities and differences between those languages.

The Tower of Babel did in fact exist: it was a seven-stage ziggurat (stepped pyramid) with a temple to the god Marduk at the top. It was called Etemenanki, or 'the temple of the platform between heaven and earth', and was built in the city of Babylon sometime during the 6th or 7th century BC.

Natural languages

Afrikaans, Albanian, Aleut, Alsatian, Amharic, Anglo-Saxon, Arabic, Aragonese, Aramaic, Armenian, Aromanian, Asturian, Basque, Bengali, Bislama, Bosnian, Breton, Bulgarian, Burmese, Cantonese, Catalan, Cebuano, Chinese, Chin Falam, Chin Haka, Chin Tedim, Church Slavonic, Cornish, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dawan, Dutch, English, Estonian, Ewe, Faroese, Farsi/Persian, Finnish, French, Frisian, Fulani, Galician, German, Greek (Ancient), Greek (Modern), Greenlandic, Haitian Creole, Hausa, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Inuktitut, Irish, Italian, Japanese, Kannada, Kekchi, Korean, Ladino, Latin, Latvian, Lithuanian, Low Saxon, Macedonian, Malay, Malayalam, Maltese, Manx, Maori, Mongolian, Ndebele, Norwegian, Nuer, Papiamentu, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Sakao, Scottish Gaelic, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Sorbian, Southern Min, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Syriac, Tagalog, Tamasheq, Tamil, Thai, Tigrinya, Turkish, Tuvaluan, Ukrainian, Urdu, Vietnamese, Welsh, Xhosa, Yiddish, Zarma, Zulu

Constructed languages/alphabets

Bel'Arian, Cujoltha, Esperanto, Folkspraak, Ido, Interglossa, Interlingua, Interlingue/Occidental, Klingon, Lingua Franca Nova, Lojban, Oxidilogi, Quenya, Quikscript, Sabethir, Toki Pona, Üqoi, Viozian

Diamonds

Sources

Details of the background to the tale of the Tower of Babel
http://www.ldolphin.org/babel.html

More translations of Tower of Babel story (mainly constructed languages)
http://www.langmaker.com/db/bbl_a2z_index.htm

Other multilingual pages: