Hasnain says:

"At the turn of the 14th century, when Latin was already dead except as a language of scholars and priests, a Tuscan writer called Dante Alighieri observed that many words were almost identical across the Romance languages. He went on to make the frankly heretical suggestion that this was because the various flavours of Romance were all descended from Latin. At the time, in Europe, there was no concept of language evolution. The Bible held that linguistic diversity and its corollary, mutual bewilderment, was the punishment visited on humanity by God for the impertinent construction of the Tower of Babel—and medieval Europeans took the Bible literally."

Posted on 2025-07-04T23:35:31+0000