---
title: God confused their language and scattered them over the earth. — Noah and the Tower of Babel · tree and pragmatics
description: God confused their language and scattered them over the earth. Who acts: God. A sentence of the lesson «Noah and the Tower of Babel» of the religion ethics course of Mova's primary school with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# Noah and the Tower of Babel, sentence 17

<!-- .ven lang=en -->
God confused their language and scattered them over the earth.

<!-- .vintro -->
**Who acts:** God · **What happens:** confuse, scatter · **To what, where:** language, cultures, earth

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This is a sentence of the lesson «Noah and the Tower of Babel» of the religion ethics course of Mova's primary school. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (God), what happens, when and where, as Mova's frames read it from the tree.

## The tree {#tree}

```conllu
# sent_id = school:religion-ethics:003-noah-and-the-tower-of-babel.lesson:17
# text = God confused their language and scattered them over the earth.
# source = school lesson (ours)
# course = religion-ethics
# lesson = 003-noah-and-the-tower-of-babel.lesson
# annotation = Mova annot: Rust (en) → Haiku 5.5 (medium, Batches API) patches; gates UD 2.18; agreed by treeagree rules (Stanza, Trankit, spaCy trf): no change
1	God	God	PROPN	NNP	Number=Sing	2	nsubj	_	_
2	confused	confuse	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
3	their	their	PRON	PRP$	Case=Gen|Number=Plur|Person=3|Poss=Yes|PronType=Prs	4	nmod:poss	_	_
4	language	language	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	2	obj	_	_
5	and	and	CCONJ	CC	_	6	cc	_	_
6	scattered	scatter	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	2	conj	_	_
7	them	they	PRON	PRP	Case=Acc|Number=Plur|Person=3|PronType=Prs	6	obj	_	_
8	over	over	ADP	IN	_	10	case	_	_
9	the	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	10	det	_	_
10	earth	earth	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	6	obl	_	_
11	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	2	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

<!-- .note -->
No stored speech act for this sentence.

<!-- .fr -->
| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **confuse** | past | God | cultures's language |  |  |  |  | vn amalgamate-22.2-2 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent language=Patient |
| 2 | **scatter** | past | God *not said here* | cultures *= culture* |  | the earth |  |  | vn spray-9.7-1 «NP V NP PP.destination»: agent=Agent they=Theme over earth=Destination |

<!-- .note -->
One row per clause the reader finds. «not said here»: a role filled from the clause above. «roles by»: a VerbNet class and frame when one fits the verb, else the reader's rules on the tree.

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**Licence: [CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/)**, as the whole of Mova corpus 0.4, of which this treebank (the agreed school, `mova-school-agreed-en.conllu`) is part. The lessons were written for Mova's primary school. Sentence `school:religion-ethics:003-noah-and-the-tower-of-babel.lesson:17`.

**The tree:** Mova annot: Rust (en) → Haiku 5.5 (medium, Batches API) patches; gates UD 2.18; agreed by treeagree rules (Stanza, Trankit, spaCy trf): no change. **The frames** are read from the tree by Mova's frames reader (`prag`) when this page is built, the lesson read in order, so a pronoun may be resolved from an earlier sentence.

See the [release 0.4](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/releases/0.4/).

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