Prosody

Languages are good for you....so says Sophie Hardach in her book of that title.

How do children going up in multilingual societies differentiate between the tongues?  They use prosody.

Prosody is the sound, rhythm, intonation and song that is shared by languages.  Apparently if English people put on an exaggerated french accent rather that the tradition tortured affair, French people actually get that it is french, and don't say 'is that English?'

Most counties, now, and across time, have been multilingual.  Hardach is very interested in Sumerian, which was taught until AD 100 as an intellectual language, but as Latin is today.  She notes that their are words that many have come from Sumerian into Arkkadian, and on into Aramaic, and Hebrew.  

Apparently King Nebuchadnezzar's name is derived from Sumerian (Nebu- protector) and Arkkadian (kudurri-usur- of the eldest son).   

The word she is most interested in the word Cumin, which she traces back to it's Sumerian origin.

Hardach also celebrates the great wealth of  preserved rubbish in Jewish synagogues over many years.  These repositories, (called the Genizah) were developed to collect any bit of written material that might include the sacred word G_D.  The repositories were designed to periodically 'bury' the material in order to preserve the dignity of G_D's name.  Many synagogues did not have much land available for these burials, and their stashes of rubbish became great over time.  Also over time, the bits of paper slowly became increasingly valuable to historian.  Eventually the synagogue in Alexandria agreed to hand over it's complete collection to Cambridge University for researches to get to work.   The research discovered than many words preserved were in different languages.  Hardach notes that spells and incantations are often in strange languages.  The mystery associated with other peoples languages also meant that the risk of offending G_D was minimised by putting any suspect paper in the Genizah pile.