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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.
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
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.
References
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