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

April 16, 2014

Abstract
It was demonstrated recently [1],[2],[3] 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 efficient means
to produce and share ideas and, thus, to understand and interpret correctly, effectively, 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 semantical motor of the Semitic protolanguage.

Keywords and phrases: Semitic languages, protolanguage, verbal system,

origins of natural languages, artificial intelligence, intelligent communication,
conlag or constructed language, VBSPL Verbal Body of Semitic Protolanguage, IIH Inspirational Intelligence Hypothesis.
2010 Mathematical Subject Classification: 03B65, 52C45, 68Q45, 68Rxx,
68T30, 68T50, 90B80, 93C55,

Contents
1 Introduction

2 Biblical Hebrew

3 Trilitterality

4
1

4 Morpho-semantical similarity

5 Conclusion

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 bafflement, to wide
branches of learning.
Eugene Wigner, 1960 [23]
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 finally deign graciously to effect
that these demonstrations give way to Thy glory and the salvation of souls and nowhere be an obstacle to that.
Johannes Kepler, 1716 [17]

Introduction

We are concerned here with the well-defined and studied in detail [14] Semitic
protolanguage, SPL (or Proto-Semitic, or Common language). However, our
approach and our purposes are radically different 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 effort 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 suffered 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 different nature; theirs is an entirely internal affair. [9] (p. Etymology-1)
It means, as we believe and as we have already started to demonstrate it in
[1],[2],[3], 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 semantical motor of SPL.

These verbs are, with rare exceptions, trilateral, or triconsonantal; as a

recent introduction to SPL [14] (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 fixed order, usually three, and
a pattern of vowels and, sometimes, of affixes before and after the root.
In fact, the above root of consonants in a fixed order, usually three, should
always be a verb, as manifested by the morphology of Biblical Hebrew, BH [20],
the best preserved fossil of SPL [18]. As SPL, BH is primarily a verbal language
[4], 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 [16], almost entirely triliteral, or triconsonantal
[10], [11] the feature BH shares with all Semitic and a few other Afro-Asiatic
languages [7].
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 contain 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 filmstrip,
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. [21] (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 mem-

ory level: the stories told by preserved texts about (in particular, the history
of) the very language in which they were written.
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 satisfied the needs of its speakers. [22] (pp. 254-255)
It is also clear that one cannot interpret the stories of the Hebrew Bible as
scientific 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 [19].
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 [8], 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 (202  400) and four would be too
much (204  160000): the Biblical Hebrew dictionary has about 1400 [15] 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 final notations [12], from the
very beginning of the appearance of SPL. No notion of such letters being
simplified 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 fixed order, usually three [14] (p. 2066), we can
hypothesize that the basic meaning(s) of a trilitteral verb is (are) somehow
correlated with, if not defined by [12], the three consonants which form this
verb and their fixed order.

Morpho-semantical similarity

The last hypothesis looks even more credible if one studies the pervasiveness
of the phenomenon of topologically neighboring differing in only one or, rare,
two letter positions verbs having semantically meaningful correlations, often
related to the type of the particular letters involved [5].
In other words, there exists a natural and meaningful morpho-semantical
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 semantically neighboring the verb [he-lamed-qoph]  [divide and portion], and not the
verbs [to go out], [to go 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-semantical 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] , [iodtzade-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 [6] (pp. 1-2):
Hebrew, of course, has difficulties of its own, which must be frankly faced.
... [In particular,] the roots are almost entirely triliteral, with the result that, at
first, 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.

Conclusion

These exquisite combinatorial, topological, and communicative precision,

efficiency, and evocativeness are the real source of the so much deplored above
difficulty of mechanical memorization of SPL verbs, the difficulty 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]. [22] (p. 241)

On the other hand, one is not aware of another source which so profoundly
influenced 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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Edouard G. BELAGA
Institut de Recherche Mathmatique Avance de Strasbourg
7 rue Ren Descartes, F-67084 Strasbourg Cedex, FRANCE
e-mail: edouard.belaga@math.unistra.fr