In many parts of the world, you will find people of thesame ethnic group, living...

In many parts of the world, you will find people of the
same ethnic group, living a few miles apart in similar valleys under similar
conditions, speaking languages that have absolutely nothing in common with each
other. This sort of thing is not an oddity -- it is ubiquitous. Many linguists
have tried to understand Babel, the question of why human language tends to
fragment, rather than converging on a common tongue?" "Has anyone come up with
an answer yet?"
"The question is difficult and profound," the Librarian says. "Lagos had a
theory."
"Yes?"
"He believed that Babel was an actual historical event. That it happened in a
particular time and place, coinciding with the disappearance of the Sumerian
language. That prior to Babel Infopocalypse, languages tended to converge. And
that afterward, languages have always had an innate tendency to diverge and
become mutually incomprehensible -- that this tendency is, as he put it, coiled
like a serpent around the human brainstem."
"The only thing that could explain that is --" Hiro stops, not wanting to say
it.
"Yes?" the Librarian says.
"If there was some phenomenon that moved through the population, altering their
minds in such a way that they couldn't process the Sumerian language anymore.
Kind of in the same way that a virus moves from one computer to another,
damaging each computer in the same way. Coiling around the brainstem."
"Lagos devoted much time and effort to this idea," the Librarian says. "He felt
that the nam-shub of Enki was a neurolinguistic virus.