12. God speaks to men, not through the agency of invisible substance, but by an embodied being, in which form he has willed to appear to men when he has spoken. The Apostle says also: “If I speak with the tongues of men and of angels”, where the question arises in what tongue angels speak. Not that angels have languages, but this is said figuratively.

13. Likewise it is asked what tongue men will speak in future. The answer is nowhere found....

14. And we have written first about tongues and later about nations for the reason that nations have arisen from tongues, not tongues from nations.

Chapter 2. On names of Nations.

2. The nations among whom the earth is divided are seventy-three. Fifteen from Japhet, thirty-one from Cham, twenty-seven from Sem, which make seventy-three, or rather, as calculation shows, seventy-two, and as many languages began to exist throughout the lands, and increasing they filled the provinces and islands.

9. ... These[323] are the nations of the stock of Sem, possessing the southern land from the sun-rise all the way to the Phoenicians.

25. ... These[323] are the nations of the stock of Cham, who hold all the southern part from Sidon all the way to the Strait of Cadiz.

37. These are the nations of the stock of Japhet, which possessed the half of Asia and all Europe as far as the British Ocean, leaving names to both places and peoples from Mt. Taurus to Aquilo, of which at a later time a great many were changed, but the rest remain as they were.

38. For the names of many peoples have remained in part, so that it is evident to-day whence they were derived, as the Assyrians from Assur, the Hebrews from Heber, but they have changed in part, through length of time, so that the most learned men scanning the oldest histories have with difficulty been able to find the origins, not of all, but of some of them.

39. ... And if all things should be considered, it is evident that a greater number of peoples have changed their names than have kept them, and different reasons have imposed different names on them. For the Indi were so-called from the river Indus which bounds them on the west.