Spake

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spake

Title text: Really, if every country could be partitioned a couple times, it'd be really nice for science.

Explanation

In the biblical story of the Tower of Babel, God splits the language of humans into many different tongues, preventing them from being united enough to reach heaven again. This comic parodies the fact that to linguists, the variety of languages is a subject of fascination and study, much like the variety of animal forms attributed to God's greatness earlier in Genesis.

It's the same joke as in https://xkcd.com/2421/.

The votey references conlangers, people who design new languages for various reasons. [God] calls them freaks, as the creation of various languages was intended as a curse in the story, so constructing even more of them out of a passion for language is further exacerbating something meant to be bad, continuing the theme from the comic of contrasting the "languages as a curse" view of the Bible and the "languages as fascinating" view of linguists.

Transcript

[A man in a suit with a yellow tie holds a microphone in his left hand and holds his right hand up next to it. He looks upwards with squinted eyes. The background is a red curtain.]

Man: And the lord spake, saying "behold, now I have made grammars as multitudinous as the stars. Let all word orders shine forth in their varied lexicons, and let every phoneme dwell in some mouth!"

Caption: Linguists have their own version of the Babel myth.

Votey Transcript

[In color, God above the clouds, looking down.]

God: Now to create some freaks who invent new languages.

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