English and Lashon Hakodesh

Every native English speaker has at times been stricken with similarities between English and Hebrew, There are many points of resemblance, in fact so many that a relationship between these two languages are impossible to ignore. There are similarities in vocabulary, syntax and even in grammar. Let's look at some of these resemblances:

1.Vocabulary

There are many words that either directly or by reverse application of Grimm's Law ( a statement of how certain sounds systematically transform to other sounds) are shared by both languages. Examples include chitah/wheat, tsippor/sparrow, gedi/kid, and many others. The shared vocabulary is especially prominent in the case of Germanic languages. Curiously about a third of Germanic vocabulary is not Germanic at all and much of it appears to be of Semitic origin.

Much of this material is found in The Word, a dictionary of resemblances between Hebrew and English, see here http://www.homestead.com/edenics/word_contents.html.

However, these facts have not escaped notice of mainstream linguists, who, without any evidence whatsoever conjecture that Semitic sailors must have reached and settle European coast in numbers large enough to have an influence of such extent upon proto-Germanic. Others have posited a common proto-language, the so called Nostratic that gave rise of both the Semitic and Indo-European family of languages.

Linguists believe that words that are used most often tend to change the least. Among such words are personal pronouns and prepositions. There is no question that the words of I , thou , he and she, they etc are remarkably similar in the Indo-European languages and the Semitic tongues.

2.Grammar

Semitic languages are unique in using a consonantal root system. Words are formed by varying the vowels within a three consonant root. This characteristic of Semitic languages is so unique that there is no other language group (there is apparently one American Indian language that uses the same system) built upon this principle. Because it is so unique, most linguists continue to classify Semitic as a part of Afro-Semitic family. relating it to the languages of Northern Africa, with which Semitic languages also share certain characteristics.

However, there are traces of this system in Germanic languages. For example, in English there are many irregular verbs that vary meaning by changing vowels within a root. Examples include break/ broke, hang/ hung, and in German -bruder/ brider etc.

There are those who attempt to explain these connections by positing that the ten lost tribes of Israel ended up in Europe. On one visit to Israel I met a Scottish ger who devoted his life to this kind of research. He gave me his book on the subject. See http://www.britam.org/

What does one make of it? I think that it makes the candidacy of Hebrew or something like Hebrew a more likely proto-language than many others. I understand that that is not what the linguists currently think, but the general trend is to accept the existence of at least a few proto-languages. While controversy shrouds the  attempts by Greenberg to reconstruct at least some words and phrases in the original proto-language, the field as a whole agrees that this is a reasonable supposition, only that such a language is not within our capacity to reconstruct.

It occurred to me that the consonantal root-structure  of Semitic languages is conservative. Languages tend to change though a variety of ways, accretion, grammatization, borrowing etc. The structure of Semitic languages tends to work against indiscriminate change. Hebrew did not change for over a thousand years, and not because everything was written at the same time period, but because the language is conservative and because written Scripture tend to preserve a language.

I think that the claim that Lashon Hakodesh was the original language is not implausible. It is as easy to construct a language tree with Hebrew as the trunk as to shunt it away into a branch of Afro-Hamitic. The real reasons not to do so is more cultural than scientific.

Comments

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I think that it makes the candidacy of Hebrew or something like Hebrew a more likely proto-language than many others.