1

Interpreting Semitic Protolanguage as a Conlag -

Constructed Language. II
Dr. Edouard Belaga
IRMA Universit de Strasbourg 7, rue Ren Descartes 67084 Strasbourg Cedex, FRANCE e-mail:
edouard.belaga@math.unistra.fr
July 17, 2014
Abstract
It was demonstrated recently [1], [2], [3], [4] that he body V of verbs (almost all
triconsonantal) of the Semitic protolanguage has a rich and profound organic structure.
We will show here that V is an intelligently conceived and expertly realized organismic
linguistic system with, on the one hand, explicit links to biological, psychological,
social, intellectual, and spiritual aspects of human life, and, on the other hand, simple
and ecient means to produce and share ideas and, thus, to understand and interpret
correctly, eectively, and extremely appropriately all realities of human life. In
particular, the semitic proto-alphabet, a part and parcel of this structure, turns out to be
of a critical importance for the very existence, construction, and functioning of V in its
role of the morphological basis and semantic motor of the Semitic protolanguage.
Keywords and phrases: Semitic languages, protolanguage, verbal system, origins of
natural languages, articial intelligence, intelligent communication, conlag or constructed
language, VBSPL Verbal Body of Semitic Protolanguage, IIH Inspirational Intelligence
Hypothesis.
2010 Mathematical Subject Classication: 03B65, 52C45, 68Q45, 68Rxx, 68T30, 68T50,
90B80, 93C55,
Contents
1. Introduction 2
2. Biblical Hebrew 3
3. Trilitterality 4
4. Morpho-semantic similarity 5
2
5. Conclusion 5
The miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the
formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither
understand nor deserve. We should be grateful for it and hope that it will
remain valid in future research and that it will extend, for better or for
worse, to our pleasure, even though perhaps also to our baement, to
wide branches of learning.
Eugene Wigner, 1960 [24]
If I have been allured into rashness by the wonderful beauty of Thy works,
or if I have loved my own glory among men, while I am advancing in work
destined for Thy glory, be gentle and merciful and pardon me; and nally
deign graciously to eect that these demonstrations give way to Thy glory
and the salvation of souls and nowhere be an obstacle to that.
Johannes Kepler, 1716 [18]
1 Introduction
We are concerned here with the well-dened and studied in detail [15] Semitic
protolanguage, SPL (or Proto-Semitic, or Common language). However, our approach and
our purposes are radically dierent from the traditional ones mostly descriptive,
comparative, generational, etc. in one term, extrinsic ones. In our case, we are deeply
impressed by the vertical organizational complexity and beauty of SPL, suggesting intrinsic
methods of its investigation:
The etymology of the Indo-European languages is a painstaking eort to sort through the
havoc wreaked upon the originally perfect language by its diverse and dispersed speakers.
One of its aims is the recovery of the root system of the primitive Indo-European language,
lost in these upheavals. It is also greatly preoccupied with tracing the distortions suered by
words apparently common to the various members of this family of languages as they
gradually drifted apart from the mother tongue. The etymology of the Semitic languages,
which are fully developed yet have retained their primeval root system in pristine form, is of
a dierent nature; theirs is an entirely internal aair. [10] (p. Etymology-1)
It means, as we believe and as we have already started to demonstrate it in [1], [2], [3],
[4], that this language has the unique privilege to incorporate an intelligently conceived and
expertly realized organismic linguistic system V of verbs, the morphological basis and
semantic motor of SPL.
3
These verbs are, with rare exceptions, trilateral, or triconsonantal; as a recent
introduction to SPL [15] (p. 2066) attempts to present this:
A distinctive characteristic of the Semitic languages is the formation of words by the
combination of a root of consonants in a xed order, usually three, and a pattern of
vowels and, sometimes, of axes before and after the root.
In fact, the above root of consonants in a xed order, usually three, should always be
a verb, as manifested by the morphology of Biblical Hebrew, BH [21], the best preserved
fossil of SPL [19]. As SPL, BH is primarily a verbal language [5], with an average verse of
the Hebrew Bible containing no less than three verbs and with the biggest part of its
vocabulary representing morphological derivations from verbal roots [17], almost entirely
triliteral, or triconsonantal [11], [12] the feature BH shares with all Semitic and a few
other Afro-Asiatic languages [8].
We believe, and we intend to show here with all necessary arguments, that SPL is a
radically new language, perfectly appropriate for the dynamical intelligence of human life,
which was at the origins of not only Semitic languages, but also brought a new light into
modern Indo-European languages and their cultures:
The scene of Yaels slaying Sisera in Deborahs Song may serve as an illustration.
The poetic Hebrew text records the episode in three verses, which con-tain altogether thirty-
six parts of speech: sixteen verbs, and only twenty static elements: nouns, adjectives,
pronouns and connective vocables (Juda 5:25-27). Because of the large number of words of
action, the one-dimensional stationary text conveys a visual impression of progressive
motion, almost like in a lmstrip, or in a painting with successive registers. In translations,
the number of verbs roughly equals their number in the Hebrew text. But the amount of non-
verbal expressions is at least trebled. The increased volume of static vocables results in a
slowing down of dramatic motion. [22] (p. 12)
Biblical Hebrew
Before proceeding to the analysis of SPL, we need to make clear why the principal choice of
our experimental references is here Biblical Hebrew, BH.
Linguistic fossils of SPL are relatively numerous, very well preserved, and mostly
very good documented and studied to faithfully testify both to the state of the languages at
particular historical junctures and to its evolutionary changes.
Linguistics is the theory of language used in materially preserved exchanges, sometimes
very intelligent, detailed, deep, and substantial. These exchanges bear in many cases some
important information about the emergence of the language. Alongside the traditionally
studied linguistic fossils of material memory level, fossils extracted from preserved (and
mostly archeologically retrieved) inscriptions and texts the level corresponding to the one
and only one known in the case of biological fossils fossilized languages often possess a
higher memory level: the stories told by preserved texts about (in particular, the history of)
the very language in which they were written.
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For particular and well-known history reasons, BH has been preserved during many
centuries, if not millennia, with extreme precautions, as the language of the sacred texts of
the Jewish people. Besides the linguistic data, such as the dictionary, morphology rules,
syntax, etc, the sacred texts have preserved the history of the people who spoke BH, two to
three thousand years before common era.
Sure, this SPL fossil is not a language by itself:
Is Biblical Hebrew a language? In the sense in which I have been endeavoring to
present the problem BH is clearly no more than a linguistic fragment. To be sure, a very
important and indeed far-reaching fragment, but scarcely a fully integrated language which
in this form, with these phonological features, and these morphological aspects, and stylistic
and syntactical resources, could ever have been spoken and have satised the needs of its
speakers. [23] (pp. 254-255)
It is also clear that one cannot interpret the stories of the Hebrew Bible as scientic
documentation. Still, BH as a fossil is an extremely faithful linguistic fragment, and the
stories it preserved are of hight importance because of their wholehearted insistence on truth
and their impressive realism.
Trilitterality
Trilitterality is the most remarkable and well-observed property of the supermajority of
Semitic verbs [20].
Its presence implies by itself several remarkable properties of SPL, mostly still either
unrecognized or underestimated:
1. The total number of Hebrew verbs being less than 2000 [9], one can only admire the
extreme parsimoniousness, one could say optimality from the point of view of
Information Theory of the triconsonantal representation of verbs: two consonants
would be not enough (20
2
= 400) and four would be too much (20
4
= 160000): the
Biblical Hebrew dictionary has about 1400 [16] verbs among about 8000 words.
2. Taken by itself, trilitterality forces an explicit linguistic recognition of the existence of
Semitic consonants, with the proto-Semitic alphabet, PSAB, being present actually,
even if not necessary in its nal notations [13], from the very beginning of the
appearance of SPL. No notion of such letters being simplied fossils of some
ancient hieroglyphs is workable in the trilitterality context.
3. Going back to the above, and correct, distinctive characteristic of the Semitic
languages being the formation of words [verbs] by the combination of a root of
consonants in a xed order, usually three [15] (p. 2066), we can hypothesize that the
basic meaning(s) of a trilitteral verb is (are) somehow correlated with, if not dened by
[13], the three consonants which form this verb and their xed order.

5
4 Morpho-semantic similarity
The last hypothesis looks even more credible if one studies the pervasiveness of the
phenomenon of topologically neighboring diering in only one or, rare, two letter
positions verbs having semanticly meaningful correlations, often related to the type of the
particular letters involved [6].
In other words, there exists a natural and meaningful morpho-semantic topology on the
body V of SPL verbs, a fundamental and unique feature of verbal architectures of Semitic
languages.
For example, the verb [he-lamed-kaph] : [to go], which can be interpreted as [to progress
step by step toward a goal], is both morphologically and semanticly neighboring the verb
[he-lamed-qoph] : [divide and portion], and not the verbs [to go out], [togo up], [to go
down],i. e.,[iod-tzade-aleph], [ain-lamedhe], [iod-resh-daleth], which are neighboring the
verbs [iod-tzade-ain] (extend), [alephlamed-he] (master), and [ghimmel-resh-daleth]
(scrape; scratch), respectively.
The unique peculiarities of the Semitic triconsonantal morphological structure of verbs
and their morpho-semantic topology did not completely escape the attention of previous
generations of Western linguists. The example of the verbs [to go], [to go out], [to go up],
[to go down], i. e., [he-lamed-kaph], [iod-tzade-aleph], [ain-lamed-he], [iod-resh-daleth],
has been discussed, for example, in the following methodological warning opening a
popular Hebrew grammar edited more than a century ago [7] (pp. 1-2):
Hebrew, of course, has diculties of its own, which must be frankly faced. ... [In
particular,] the roots are almost entirely triliteral, with the result that, at rst, the verbs at
any rate all look painfully alike e.g., malak, zakar, lamad, harag, etc., thus imposing
upon the memory a seemingly intolerable strain. Compound verbs are impossible: there is
nothing in Hebrew to correspond to the great and agreeable variety presented by Latin,
Greek, or German in such verbs as exire, inire, abire, redire, ... ausgehen, eingehen,
aufgehen, untergehen, etc. Every verb has to be learned separately; the verbs to go out, to
go up, to go down are all dissyllables of the type illustrated above, having nothing in
common with one another and being quite unrelated to the verb to go.
5 Conclusion
These exquisite combinatorial, topological, and communicative precision, eciency,
and evocativeness are the real source of the so much deplored above diculty of
mechanical memorization of SPL verbs, the diculty which would be considerably
aggravated if the quoted manual should be written somewhen in between the third and
second millennium BC:
It has, of course, long been recognized that the ancient Hebrew vocabulary must have
been markedly larger than that preserved in the OT [Old Testament, alias Hebrew Bible].
[23] (p. 241)
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On the other hand, one is not aware of another source which so profoundly inuenced
the history of the humanity.
The fact that the last argument belongs neither to the linguistic terminology, nor to the
linguistic argumentation should not distract us from an appreciation of the dynamic
appropriateness and expressive power of the language which served this transformation and
which was a linguistic implication, probably a formalized version, of SPL.
One is impressed by the simultaneous appearance in our history of a particularly creative
generation of men and of a language which was the main instrument of their elevation.
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