“The Greeks, who looked upon themselves as the only people who were good speakers and had a refined language, called all the other peoples barbarians — because of their rough and boorish way of speaking. But in fact, no matter how cultivated a language may be, even it can be described as ‘barbarous’ — when nobody can understand it!”
Hodge on ‘tongues’ in I Cor. 14:10-12
Hodge comments: “‘There are ever so many…languages in the world’…. The context…shows that the reference is to human speech. Therefore, the words genee phoonoon should be translated ‘kinds of languages.’ Gen. 1 & 11. And no one of them ‘is without signification’ — i.e., inarticulate. The phrase is phoonee aphoonos — ‘a language which is no language’ –that is, without significancy (which is the essence of a language)! The very point is that as all languages are significant, so the languages used by those who spoke with tongues were significant. The difficulty was not in the language used, but in the ignorance of the hearer….
