The Historical Linguistic Record and the Limits of Language Reconstruction

• Jessi Warthen

  Author

This paper evaluates the origin of human linguistic diversity by holding the biblical account of Babel and the secular model of gradual linguistic evolution to a single evidentiary standard: documented data rather than extrapolated estimate. Working only from confirmed counts in the Ethnologue and Glottolog databases, it establishes a conservative baseline of roughly 8,000 documented languages and observes that confirmed language isolates approach or exceed one third of all language families, a proportion poorly predicted by gradual divergence from a common ancestral tongue. A population model derived from the Genesis genealogies, applying a fertility parameter drawn directly from the Table of Nations, yields approximately 800 male heads of family present at Babel and a resulting ratio near ten documented languages per original group, a rate consistent with observable diversification in known families such as Indo-European. The persistence of unrelated isolates, including Basque and Sumerian, together with the documented universality of flood accounts among geographically isolated populations such as the Selk'nam, Jarawa, and Inuit, supplies independent lines of evidence that converge on a single dispersal event. When admitted as a live hypothesis and tested against documented data, the biblical model performs more consistently on this body of evidence than a secular alternative reliant on undocumented prehistoric language counts and diffusion mechanisms that fail precisely where the evidence is most isolated.

1. Jessi Warthen

   Jessi Warthen is an independent researcher working across ancient history, biblical chronology, linguistics, genetics and astrophysics within a Young Earth Creationist framework. For roughly a decade, she has studied primary sources, population genetics, and the documented archaeological and linguistic record to test biblical historicity against measurable data, an approach that treats the biblical text as a reliable historical source rather than arguing from theological premise alone.

   Her research interests include the chronology of the Ancient Near East, with current work reconstructing the Exodus timeline against Egyptian dynastic history, and the documented linguistic record as evidence for the Babel dispersion described in Genesis 10 and 11.  She also examines the unresolved scientific problems within abiogenesis research as evidence against unguided origin-of-life models and is developing an alternative cosmological hypothesis examining the role of magnetism in cosmic structure and motion, an area where she finds significant unresolved tension within the standard model.

   Warthen studied history with a focus on secondary education licensure and is a Marine Corps veteran. She continues her research independently, outside formal academic institutions, and has contributed historical material to independent creation-science media.

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