Editing 2421: Tower of Babel

{{comic
| number    = 2421
| date      = February 5, 2021
| title     = Tower of Babel
| image     = tower_of_babel.png
| titletext = Soon, linguists will be wandering around everywhere, saying things like "colorless green ideas sleep furiously" and "more people have been to Russia than I have," and speech will become unintelligible.
}}

==Explanation==
{{incomplete|Created by a COLORLESS GREEN IDEA. Please mention here why this explanation isn't complete. Do NOT delete this tag too soon.}}

The story of the {{w|Tower of Babel}} is the Biblical explanation for the existence of different languages in the world. In the story, humans endeavor to build a tower reaching heaven. Their arrogance angers God and prompts him to sabotage the project. He does this by "confounding their speech" (commonly interpreted as giving everyone their own language), inhibiting their ability to work together.

In this retelling, however, the tower is actually finished. God is happy to receive the human visitors, and offers them a reward.

The party that ascends to the top of the tower consists of Cueball, Megan and a third figure most likely representing linguist {{w|Gretchen McCulloch}}, previously seen in [[2381: The True Name of the Bear]]. When Gretchen expresses her love of words, God offers to create a panoply of languages. Megan immediately sees the problems with this, but Gretchen is enthusiastic. Instead of a punishment by God, linguistic diversity is presented as a well-intended challenge.

{{w|Phonology}}, a part of linguistics, is the study of the sound system used in a language or dialect, or of the systems that languages use to organize sounds. {{w|b:Conlang/Advanced/Grammar/Alignment|Morphosyntactic alignment}} is the grammatical relationship between the noun arguments to a verb &mdash; for example, between the two arguments (in English, the subject and object) of transitive verbs like ''the dog chased the cat'', and the single argument of intransitive verbs like ''the cat ran away''.

The title text expands the joke by suggesting that the miscommunication caused by the Tower of Babel is not due to language barriers, but instead because of intentionally meaningless sentences created by linguists to illustrate points about grammar, and identifies two famous examples of such . "{{w|Colorless green ideas sleep furiously}}", coined by linguist {{w|Noam Chomsky}} in 1957, is an example of a sentence that is structurally correct but contains paradoxes and meaningless comparisons: something cannot be both colorless AND green (see {{w|Invisible Pink Unicorn}}), ideas do not sleep, and sleeping is not generally done furiously. That said, the sentence "colorless green ideas sleep furiously" is so well known in linguistics that a competition to make the sentence meaningful was held in 1985 and {{w|Colorless_green_ideas_sleep_furiously#Attempts_at_meaningful_interpretations|attracted a number of entrants}}.

"More people have been to Russia than I have" is a well-known example of {{w|comparative illusion}}. It sounds like it means something but, upon actual analysis, does not, although it could be interpreted as there being more people to visit Russia than the speaker owns, or has in their household.

==Trivia==
In [[2381: The True Name of the Bear]], sentences spoken by Gretchen McCulloch do not have periods at their ends, a fact which she mentioned on Twitter. However, in this comic, she uses periods, so her previous periodlessness might be a coincidence and not a trait of her character on xkcd.

==Transcript==
:[The Tower of Babel is show. It has a broad two sectioned base and above that extends straight up out of the top of the frame, with 10 identical segments. This is seen from a far, so the three people standing at the base of the tower is very small. But Cueball and Megan can be easily identified. They are standing on either side of a woman with big curly hair (which is first clear in the next panel). The text spoken is written over the tower in white sections that hides the tower. But the tower can be seen above, between and below these two text segments:] 
:Cueball: The Tower of Babel is complete!
:Megan: Let's go meet God!

:[Cueball, the curly haired woman and Megan are now standing at the top of the Tower of Babel. The top is made of bricks, but the part of the last segment before the top looks like those shown in the first panel. God is represented by an off-panel voice coming from a star burst at the top of the panel. The three people look up in that direction.]
:Cueball: Hi God!
:God (off-panel): Wow, nice tower!
:God (off-panel): You did a great job! I'm so proud!
:Megan: Thanks!

:[Same settings but Megan has turned towards the curly haired woman holding an arm out towards her. The woman has taken one hand to her chin.]
:God (off-panel): I'm going to give you a reward.
:God (off-panel): What do you like about the world?
:Curly haired woman: Hmm. Words are really cool.
:Megan:  No, wait-

:[Same settings, in a broader panel. The curly haired woman lifts her hands up curled into fists. Her yell comes from a starburst over her head, to indicate the difference to normal speech. Megan has taken her arm down.]
:God (off-panel): Great! I'm going to give you lots of languages to study, each with its own phonology, word ordering, morphosyntactic alignment...
:Curly haired woman: '''''YESSSSSS!'''''
:Megan:  We should '''''not''''' have brought a linguist.

{{comic discussion}}

[[Category:Comics featuring Megan]]
[[Category:Comics featuring Cueball]]
[[Category:Religion]]
[[Category:Language]]