The Biblical Flood story is a uniquely bad fit in terms of both religious rationality or scientific empiricism.
Joshua @swamidass found a way to fit the GAE scenario into a modern scientific world… if one absolutely requires Adam/Eve to explain original sin.
But the flood story is much more troublesome… on any level of analysis.
I assume you are joking. (And I appreciate a good joke.) And if any reader doesn’t see the joke in it, the reason this poses no problem for “the Bible is God’s word” belief is because languages evolve over time (changing both pronunciation and orthography) AND because the rules and restrictions of a language may require “imported” words to comply with those rules. Of course, these changes do not represent “errors” or some imperfection (although corruption is certainly possible, depending on how you define “corruption.”) They simply reflect the realities of language.
An example is the name YESHUA (or YEHOSHUA) in Old Testament Hebrew, which gets rendered as JOSHUA in English—or if it is coming through Koine Greek (of the New Testament) as the intermediate language (i.e. as IHSOUS), it gets renders in English as JESUS. (Among the changes/explanations is that first century Koine Greek has no SH sound.) So these changes are not “imperfections” or transmission errors. They are just what happens with dynamic, ever-evolving languages.
I would consider it possible—but I’m not an expert on Ancient Near Eastern Languages (nor their precursors) so I don’t know that my opinion is worth much. Nevertheless, if we had more data on the precursor languages, we might see it as obvious why ARATTA became ARARAT. (These kinds of changes happen all of the time in modern languages—and ancient ones.)
Coincidentally, I just today read a linguistic analysis of some ways in which the German spoken in 16th century Rhineland-Westphalia, the Palatinate, and the Berne district of Switzerland evolved into the modern day “Pennsylvania Dutch” spoken in various DISTINCT DIALECTS in the Amish communities of the USA and Canada. (And in a doctoral dissertation I read a few years ago, the author found that the Berne, Indiana Amish community near Ft.Wayne, Indiana was not extremely different from that spoken on the street in Berne, Switzerland today—but just a few miles to the northwest in colonies like Topeka, Indiana, it is difficult for a Berne speaker to converse with the Amish farmers. [That factoid is probably of interest to no one but me but I have personal familiarity with both communities and while growing up I dealt with a lot of livestock purchased from Amish farmers in Topeka.])
No. I would never make that assumption. Vowel differences (and vowel shifts over time) can easily be tricky to transliterate—and sometimes the “original” vowel-sound is even mid-way between two English vowel choices. [Think about the the German umlaut vowels, for example, and how such German proper nouns get pronounced in English.]
Speaking of vowel-shifts that make things tricky, take a look at this summary of the Great Vowel Shift of the English language:
The Great Vowel Shift of the 1400’s and 1500’s explains all sorts of weird spellings of Modern English. The “frozen” spellings we use today reflect the pronunciations of long ago. Of course, spelling incongruities have multiple explanations in addition to the Great Vowel Shift. Among the most interesting is the fact that some of the letters used to write Old English and Middle English were “retired” and replaced with rough approximations.
I’ll dare to introduce this tangent, just to make what I think is an interesting point. And to do it, I found that the Gemini AI engine produced a nifty summary:
The Old English alphabet included the 24 letters of the Latin alphabet, plus five additional letters: Long S (ſ), Eth (Ð and ð), Thorn (þ), Wynn (ƿ), and Ash (ᚫ; later Æ and æ).
The Middle English alphabet included the letters a–z, plus three runic letters. The Old English letters ash, eth, thorn, and wynn quickly disappeared from the Middle English alphabet, and v and w appeared later.
The first alphabet used for Old English was the Anglo-Saxon runic alphabet, also known as futhorc. It was used from the 5th to the 7th centuries, and then rarely until the start of the 11th century.
To drive these points home, anybody who has wondered why English has strange spellings like ENOUGH & THROUGH or why the plural of WIFE is WIVES (or the plural of CHILD is CHILDREN instead of CHILDS) may want to investigate the fascinating evolution of the English language.
One last point from my memories of being the lowly Associate Instructor for a Computation Linguistics class of eager doctoral students in 1981: one contrarian student who did not have much typical background in historical linguistics protested somewhat smugly: “But how could anyone really know how 15th century English-language vowels sounded, unless they had a time machine to go back and listen.” There are actually multiple ways but among the easiest to appreciate is by the use of rhyming poetry. Indeed, if a modern-English speaker of today reads aloud Middle English rhyming poetry (e.g., Chaucer), they will think it doesn’t rhyme at all! That is because the vowels before the Great Vowel Shift don’t make sense to us today.
So imagine you had to render some Middle English proper nouns with Modern English spellings. Have fun.
[Here we are some 43 years later and I’m feeling like an expired linguist. Or at least a very tired one after writing the above tome. But I thought it might be worth the effort because I assume @misterme987 likes to read stuff like this!]
You assume correctly! 
Count me among that nerdy mob
Are vowels even marked in the Hebrew bible? We’re they 2500 years ago?
No.
See this:
The Hebrew vowels - Jonathan Frate
The Masoretes are discussed here:
"
In biblical literature: The medieval period
“… [in] the Middle Ages, the Masoretes of Babylonia and Palestine (6th–10th century) had fixed in writing, by points and annotation, the traditional pronunciation, punctuation, and (to some extent) interpretation of the biblical text.”
“The rise of the Karaites, who rejected rabbinic tradition [of the Masoretes] and appealed to scripture alone (8th century onward …”
I find that many/most people assume that no vowels appeared in the written Hebrew of 2500 years ago (because they have been told that the Masoretic [fully vowel-pointed] Hebrew Text was developed between the 6th and 10th centuries AD.) Yet, long before that, the 22 letter “consonantal alphabet” had four letters which could also serve as vowels. They are/were:
ALEPH: silent consonant but also serve as vowels “a” or “e”.
HEY: H-consonant but also as vowel “e”
VAV: V-consonant but also as vowels “o” or “u”
YUD: Y-consonant but also as vowel “i”
Thus, the three-letter Hebrew word for Adam in Genesis could be transliterated to Roman letters as ADM and the meaning and pronunciation would be familiar to native speakers/readers without Masoretic vowel points.
By the way, without getting into the complexities of the evolution of this one letter, the written ALEPH may have been based upon the Egyptian hieroglyph for an ox’s head. If you take our modern capital-A and turn it upside down, it looks somewhat like an ox’s head—especially if you extend the cross-bar to give the impression of boths ears and horns. (And ELEPH was the Biblical Hebrew word for ox.)
More fodder for the linguistics nerds on PS.
There was a great movie called SAHARA:
“Sahara is a 1943 American action war film directed by Zoltán Korda and starring Humphrey Bogart as an American tank commander in Libya who, along with a handful of Allied soldiers, tries to defend an isolated well with a limited supply of water from a German Afrika Korps battalion…”
By halfway through the movie you learn the German word for water is: “wasser” (or “vasser”, if you use a “v” for a “w”).
If water can become wasser and vice versa … then Ararat becomes a piece of cake!
An Anatolian bilingual inscription (circa 600s BCE) includes the cuneiform for the god “Ea”. The cuneiform is unique for “Ea”; it definitely refers to Ea.
The alphabetic Phoenician translates “Ea” as:
“EL, creator of the earth …”
Isn’t this just another way of coping with cuneiform vs Semitic alphabets?
How long before some fluent Semite decides to transliterate the cuneiform “Ea” into the alphabetic form “Ya”?
I was never all that personally invested in such complications but I had a colleague who coped via regular shots of Kentucky bourbon. (I discovered this while he was driving several of us to a regional AAR/SBL conference at University of Wisconsin during a major February ice storm.)
ADDENDUM:
That ANE professor died many years ago and probably would have enjoyed my telling this story about him but I’ll play it safe. He was a respected ANE scholar but his father was even more renowned, a name many Bible commentary readers would recognize. By the way, I’m glad I survived and reached Madison in time because I presented my very first academic paper there. And even though only two people showed up to hear my paper which opened the session, the Associate Dean of a prominent graduate school asked me for a printed copy in the lobby later that day and it led to my making the transition from a humdrum computer science faculty to the rarified atmosphere of the theological academy. Yes, I’m high on a new codeine prescription right now so it is easy to wax nostalgic. Wax on. Wax off.
I would suggest that WATER and WASSER probably share a common ancestor in Proto-Germanic *WATAR which probably evolved from the PIE (Proto-Indo-European) word *WOD-OR.
[The asterisk means that those ancient words are reconstructed/extrapolated from various linguistic clues. We can’t be certain of them.]
And just for fun, consider yet another “cousin language” of the PIE family, Russian, in which VODA is the word for water and VODKA is the diminuitive of VODA.
Yes, this is way more fun that a Peaceful Science participant should ever be allowed to have.
NOTE THAT I ADDED SOME FUN FACTS TO THIS POST IN A FOLLOWUP EDIT. So, @misterme987, you may want to read it again to maximize your fun.
I can see how you might get HYDOR from that, but AQUA is a puzzle. Then again, there are other cases in which Greek t (or p) corresponds to Latin kw, as in tetra/quattuor (pente/quinque). This language stuff is weird.
AQUA comes from a different PIE word.
Synonyms are much more numerous in some languages than others—and English has a history of loan words from many languages. So it has tons of synonyms and a very large vocabulary.
In this case, it has to do with how neighbor languages can promote shifts for a finite region of a wider linguistic presence … or inhibits a change that is happening elsewhere.
See article about the High German (aka Mountain German) Consonant Shift:
Here’s a paper that I just found which is kind of related to this topic:
https://doi.org/10.1177/0959683616645949
This suggests that only a few species of animals were recognized by humans living in the ancient Near East at this time (ca. 6000 BC), which has implications for the number of animals on Noah’s vessel, if the Noah flood myth is indeed based on a historical event. Thousands, let alone millions, of animals wouldn’t have been taken on the boat, but most likely just a few dozen.
@Tim responded privately because I didn’t know how to re-open the topic. I figured it out now, so here’s his response.
“If the Noah flood myth is indeed based on a historical event”, it would have been only a localised event, and there would have been no need for any “animals on Noah’s vessel”, or for the vessel itself.
This is in addition to your argument being an Argument from Silence, in that you are assuming failure to portray animals in rock-art (or indeed failure for the rock-art of them to be preserved or failure of the rock-art to have been discovered as yet) as these animals not being “recognized by humans living in the ancient Near East at this time (ca. 6000 BC)”.
I think @Tim is right, just because these animals were the only ones recognized at Shuwaymis doesn’t mean that they were the only ones recognized elsewhere, wherever the flood hero (Noah/Atrahasis/Ziusudra) would have lived. Just disregard my previous message as it’s indeed fallacious.
I am curious, though, how other local flood proponents deal with the fact that Noah was instructed to bring animals onto his boat. I agree with Tim that it doesn’t make much sense. Is this a defeater of the local flood interpretation?
And how much more absurd is it that some of the animals were birds? What need does a raven have for an ark? Of course the flood must be more than local if a raven can’t find any land.
In 2021, there was a “localized flood” around Abbotsford, British Columbia, that killed thousands of cattle and other livestock.
Is there a reason those farmers did not build wooden barges to save at least “a few dozen” of their animals?
Thousands of animals have died on flooded B.C. farms in ‘agricultural disaster’ | CBC News