Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.1 (Tek) 9/26/83; site orca.UUCP Path: utzoo!linus!decvax!mcnc!unc!ulysses!mhuxl!ihnp4!alberta!ubc-vision!uw-beaver!tektronix!orca!chrism From: chrism@orca.UUCP (Christopher Minson) Newsgroups: net.religion Subject: Speaking in forked tongues Message-ID: <581@orca.UUCP> Date: Sun, 12-Feb-84 16:51:43 EST Article-I.D.: orca.581 Posted: Sun Feb 12 16:51:43 1984 Date-Received: Tue, 14-Feb-84 01:51:23 EST Organization: Tektronix, Wilsonville OR. Lines: 74 I have seen several references to "speaking in tongues" recently in this newsgroup. These references reminded me of an amusing bit of applied religious research I did during my undergraduate days at Berkeley. A born-again fundamentalist roommate introduced me to the concept of speaking in tongues. According to him, when the Holy Spirit (whatever THAT is) "moves" within a person, that person often begins to speak in long-lost languages. Indeed, the fact that the person can speak these languages is proof of his oneness with God, and by implication, the validity of his religious beliefs. Wow, I thought. What a tool for research we have here! To think that language experts spend decades trying to decode ancient tongues, when all they really have to do is scamper over to the nearest church and hear these languages spoken fluently by the local population. Why wonder what ancient Aramaic sounded like, when an auto mechanic, inspired by religious ectasy, speaks it every Sunday? However, being the skeptic that I am, I wanted to see this miracle at close hand. So I borrowed a somewhat gaudy bible from a friend, pasted a pious expression to my face, and found my way to the nearest nest of fundamentalists. Well, needless to say, I got an earful of "tongues". It was an amazing and somewhat scary thing to see almost normal people explode in a frenzy of incomprehensible talk and chanting. Nonetheless, it was very interesting, and my scientific curiousity was aroused. Were the "tongues" true languages or simply gibberish? Having found God, I attended church again next week, except this time I concealed a small and very sensitive tape recorder in my coat. I systematically taped the chanters nearest to me, and more importantly, got a fairly good recording of the minister, who seemed to be the most fluent of the bunch. This was not done without some risk, since my recorder made a small but identifiable whirring sound, and I had visions of being discovered. There were some rough types in the congregation; the kind of people who drive pick-up trucks, collect automatic weapons, and take a dim view towards hidden recorders. Martyrdom was only an automatic rewind away. Fortunately I was not discovered, and I made it back safely to my lair with the tapes. I invited over a somewhat bemused linguistics graduate student, and the analysis began. The results were fascinating although very incomplete. To begin with, the three chanters nearest to me were verifiable frauds. Their "tongues" consisted of simple English sentences repeated over and over, and jumbled via a simple transliteration of consonants. Only by repeating this set of stock phrases very fast were they able to mask the origin of their "tongues". Of course, these three were statistically not very significant; the rest of the congregation might have been babbling an ancient Coptic liturgy for all I know. Maybe I picked the three with the least amount of faith, or maybe they just had lust in their hearts. The minister was a different story. We could come to no satisfactory conclusion about him, believe it or not. However, our analysis was certainly not very methodical, and we decided that unless we wanted to blow this up into a full research project there was no way to generate a conclusive result, one way or another. So this grand expedition into the black fringes of science came to an abrupt end. So, does anyone know of similar experiments? (Please don't flame at me - I'm completely innocent). Progress marches on, Chris