The Word speaks to you. Don't worry if you've never read anything
on language, or if you've never heard a Hebrew word. You will soon know
that you've never heard a word that wasn't Hebrew.
Let the language of Eden echo in your soul like the sound of your mother's
voice in a dream...calling you home from far away and long ago.
If you love words and truth, you'll bear with me. If you are a language
professional, you'll need far more patience, even courage, to hear me out.
Yes, I began from the Biblical given that Hebrew is the Mother tongue (Genesis,
chapter 11). It seems to me that I have begun to prove that "all the
earth was of one speech, with a unified vocabulary." (The more words have
changed, the more they have remained the same.) The "coincidence" criers
cannot be happy with the mathematical odds of my having compiled all this
data. Hebrew vocabulary has as much affinity with English as it has with
Arabic. More English words can be clearly linked to Biblical Hebrew than
to Latin, Greek or French. Most known English words, or their cognates,
appear in this book. (Check the Index). The English words that got away
don't represent holes in my thesis. Many words have simply mutated beyond
recognition, so the unused half of my files will wait for a later, bolder
edition.
With all my idol breaking, I have remained too true to conservative
linguistic rules to be iconoclastic. I am grateful for my brief training
in linguistics, and for the century of research into Indo-European roots
that often made my discoveries possible. I stand on the shoulders of giants
- though some linguists wish 14 get off their backs.
It was only a century and a half ago when a few German scientists brutalized
Mother Hebrew and ripped her children from her arms. Languages without
blond hair and blue eyes were systematically banished from the Germanic
realm, packed into carefully marked boxcars, and shipped eastward to overcrowded
and undernourished departments like Near Eastern Studies. No longer would
Near Eastern, Asian or African dialects be called a brother language. These
tongues and their speakers were said to have evolved from separate -and,
by inference, inferior-families of apes.
New laws were instituted against the age-old concept of a universal,
primary language. The irritating Judeo-Christian myth about Hebrew was
dismissed as a typical Creationist fantasy which could not stand up to
the rigors of scientific regularity. The new linguists never bothered to
scientifically disprove the time-honored belief in the primacy of Hebrew,
because, like most scientists and atheists, they worked from deep religious
convictions.
With a sigh of relief, German culture was declared Judenrein (Jew-free).
Accepted into the Indo-Aryan axis of languages were Balto-Slavic, Celtic,
classical Greek and Latin-with all their alleged offspring-and even Indo-Iranian.
Despite Abraham and David's intimacy with Hittites in the Bible, Hittite
(under the euphemism Anatolian) was allowed to hold an honorary seat at
the same linguistic table as the Germanics. Hittite was long dead, after
all, and who is to say that Hebrew itself wouldn't have been venerated
if only the Jews were finally extinct.
But no, in search of an honorable ancestor for the Aryan race, the linguists
developed a theoretical, prototype language that could even claim Sanskrit
as a child. And so, for the past several decades Western historical linguists
have been the proud Dr. Frankenstein ceators of a proto "Indo-European"
language that curiously favors the Germanic element.
Who would research Hebrew as the root language when even the Ph.D's
in Semitics hung Hebrew out on a limb called West Semitic? Nobody uncovered
a clay tablet of Proto-Semitic, but surely, the argument went, Hebrew evolved
from older more cumbersome languages. The de-evolution of words, and the
ongoing corruption of humankind, was simply not considered.
The logic was consistent with Bible criticism. If the Babylonians and
other peoples (including American Indians) all have a flood myth, then
the Biblical flood must also be a myth borrowed from an older source (or
a coincidental contrivance invented to explain a natural phenomenon.) It
was out of the question to think that Noah's flood was a fact, and that
only the God-given Bible got the facts right, uncolored by cultural corruption
over the generations.
Returning to language, the Hebrews are not the only people said to have
"invented the myth" of a primordial tongue. They are the only surviving
human entity, however, to preserve that language and to study its boundless,
superhuman profundity and engineering with lifelong joy. Hebrew was spoken
long before there was a Judea or an Abraham, but Hebrew was too much associated
with Jews to be tolerated.
The last group of Westerners to take up the lost paradise of Hebrew
included 17th century Englishmen like John Milton and his Puritan counterparts
in colonial America.
This book has roots in my own history in Plymouth, Massachusetts. As
a child I would take Sabbath morning walks to places where I read the Hebrew
tombstones and diaries of pilgrims like William Bradford. Governor Bradford
was a new Hebrew in the Promised Land of America. (He reverently desired
to study God's word in its original tongue; I don't know why so many Christians
and Jews have settled for less.) The curriculum of Harvard was full of
Hebrew, and an early graduate thesis at Harvard concerned Hebrew as the
Mother tongue. Noah Webster's etymologies (discredited for 200 years now)
were full of English words traced to "Shemitic" sources. Most significant
of all, if a vote in the Continental Congress had gone the other way, America
and much of today's world, would now be speaking Hebrew.
Decades of reconstructing theoretical common ancestors of the Germans,
Slavs, Italics, Hellenics, Indo-Iranians, etc. have ironically legitimized
what Noah Webster and the Bible would call "Japhetic" language. The third
son of Noah, Ham, is behind the generic term for African languages, and
white gentiles in the linguistic community have no trouble with the evidence
of a related Hamito - Semitic language family. Let the Blacks and Jews
share the ghetto, whisper the professors, as long as Indo-European remains
lily white.
It was a little bird that first whispered to me the obsessive dream
that this book would be for me. (And the nightmare that The Word must
be for anti-Semiticists.) That bird was the sparrow, whose Indo-European
root, sper represents the oldest generic word for "bird" in Western
languages.
I knew a TSEE-PORE (Hebrew generic term for bird) when I saw one. I
promptly left graduate school and began treating the dictionary as though
it were compiled by fallible human beings. I was, in the next decade, to
learn things about Hebrew that, sadly, are never taught.
Like physics or biology, language (Hebrew) is another divine creation
that dazzles the puny human mind with its complex simplicity and ordered
chaos. The three-letter Hebrew root is a chemical element composed of and
charged by the dance of a pair of two-letter roots exchanging electrons.
Only the dynamics of Hebrew, with its built-in synonym and antonym system,
explains why LeaF and FoLio (LF = FL) mean the same, and why BAD and BET(TER)
are similar sounding opposites. Only the vocabulary of Biblical Hebrew
contains the common denominators of otherwise unlinkable words-both within
and without the traditional language families. Only after mastering Hebrew
can a person fully understand words in English, Basque, or Swahili.
Because the majesty of Hebrew is only faintly visible in its offspring,
it is no wonder that intelligent men can still maintain that most words
are arbitrary and meaningless, or that language is the result of cavemen
grunting. Of course, some of these same brilliant academicians will insist
that a chimp at a typewriter will come up with a Shakespearian sonnet if
given enough time (about eight billion years).
As far back as Biblical times the tribe of Ephraim (linked by some Christian
theologians to the British royalty) pronounced Hebrew SHIBBOLETH as Siboleth.
After THE WORD gets around it will no longer seem odd that Hebrew
SHIM-SHONEcame to be spelled Samson.
You no longer have to be drunk to read SOURCE as "SHORE-ESH" (the Hebrew
word for root or source). You need only be intoxicated with the truth,
and to read The Word with a clear, unbiased mind. |
