"And the whole world was of one language and of one speech"

A fun site I found last night (via) has the bible in multiple languages, formatted in parallel columns. This is not itself so rare, but this particular site has the bible in both Chinese and Pinyin (the standard romanization system for Chinese), which I don't recall seeing before. And you can line those up with English, or French, or a number of other languages. Fun for those of us who don't know Chinese, but who enjoy lusting after it from a great distance.

Now, the English is that of the King James Bible -- which is to say, it's pretty but also pretty inaccurate as far as translations go. And I have no idea, really, what the provenance of the other translations are -- whether, for instance, they were translated from the original languages, or from other translations, nor how accurate they are.

Still, y'know, fun.

And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech.
Toute la terre avait une seule langue et les mêmes mots.
那时，天下人的口音，言语，都是一样.
Nàshí , tiān xià rén de kǒuyīn , yányǔ , dōu shì yíyàng.

That's Chinese in simplified characters; they also have traditional. Furthermore, they also have an audio recording of the Chinese -- pretty cool, frankly.

The one thing they don't seem to have -- an odd omission -- is the Bible in the original, i.e. Hebrew for the Tanakh, Koine Greek for the new Testament. On the other hand, you can find that a lot of places (e.g.). The site above seems really to be designed for the Chinese.

Oh, and this quote, of course, is Genesis 11:1 -- the beginning of the creation myth that this most excellent of myth collections offers for the multitude of human languages.