Although there are countless intersections of linguistics and religion, being interpretation and translation of religious texts the most prominent ones, there are not so many opportunities to speak about languages in relation to religious feasts. This is why Pentecostal Monday a.k.a. Day of the Holy Spirit, the holyday which Christians celebrate today, is a quite special feast from a linguist point of view.
Pentecostal commemorates the descent of the Holy Spirit upon the apostles and other followers of Jesus as described in the Book of Acts, Chapter 2:
“And when the day of Pentecost was fully come, they were all with one accord in one place.
And suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting.
And there appeared unto them cloven tongues like as of fire, and it sat upon each of them.
And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance.”
Apparently, this sacred possession, often symbolized by the appearance of tongues of fire above the head of the Apostles, manifested itself by means of the emergence of supernatural gifts, such as prophesying and “speaking with other tongues”. This could be interpreted as a linguistic phenomenon, known as Xenoglossy, which consists of being able to speak a natural language that the person could not have acquired by natural means or have never learned.
The objective of this gift was primarily to overcome the language barrier that God himself created by destroying the Babel tower, confusing the language of the people and scattering them throughout the earth, and which was the bigger practical problem in evangelizing non-hebrew and non-aramaic speaking people. The apostles were by the majority little educated and had no access to foreign languages. Xenoglossy was surely the fastest way to facilitate the evangelizing of foreign people, for it would significantly improve the number of potential believers the apostles could approach. Of course, and maybe equally important, this would provide the apostles with a “flashy move” which could show the non-believers that the apostles were acting on behalf of God, or –in a broader sense- the power of God itself:
“Now when this was noised abroad, the multitude came together in bewilderment, because each one heard them speaking in his own language. And they were all amazed and marvelled, saying one to another, Behold, are not all these which speak Galilaeans? Then how is it that each of us hears them in his own native language? …Amazed and perplexed, they asked one another, "What does this mean?"” (Acts 2:6 -12)
It seams that God –or the Holy Spirit, for that matter- provided the Apostles with some kind of inverted Babel Fish (wich is, of course, were Adams got the idea in the first place), for it allows the user to be understood in any language (and not to understand any language as in the Babel Fish case). It should be noted that is the speaker and not the listener witch is blessed for communication. This would imply, that the Apostles were either broadcasting in all languages at the same time or some sort of translation took place prior to the receiving by the listeners. Another possibility is a kind of divine communication, that did not need to use human language to take place. Speaking in terms of Levelt’s terminology, the communication would have taken place by means of a preverbal message, before the message had to be encoded at the Formulator.
Anyway, the story of Pentecostal raises a fairly number of issues about how this miraculous communication would fit in a general theory of translation or language production theory. But just to imagine the consequences and implications of acquiring such ability is a stimulating thought for every linguist with some time to spare on a religious holyday!
xn3ct
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