Interpreting Semitic Protolanguage as a Conlag – Constructed Language. II Dr. Edouard Belaga IRMA Université de Strasbourg 7, rue René Descartes 67084 Strasbourg Cedex, FRANCE e-mail:
[email protected]
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
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2 Biblical Hebrew
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3 Trilitterality
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4 Morpho-semantical similarity
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5 Conclusion
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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]
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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.
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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 Yael’s slaying Sisera in «Deborah’s 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)
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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-
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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.
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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».
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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.”
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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)
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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 [1] Edouard Belaga [2008]: In the Beginning Was the Verb: The Emergence and Evolution of Language Problem in the Light of the Big Bang Epistemological Paradigm. Rivista di Filologia Cognitiva (Cognitive Philology) 1:1. [2] Edouard Belaga [2014]: Interpreting Semitic Protolanguage as a Conlag, or Constructed Language, I. US-China Foreign Language March 2014, Vol.12, n¡3, 183-192. [3] Edouard Belaga [2014]: Fine -Tuning the Blueprint of the Verbal Structure of Biblical Hebrew. 13th International Conference on the History of the Language Sciences – ICHoLS XIII, to appear in the Conference Handbook, Vila Real, Portugal. [4] Robert D. Bergen, ed. [1994]: Biblical Hebrew and Discourse Linguistics. Eisenbrauns, Winona Lake, USA. [5] Matityahu Clark [1999]: Etymological Dictionary of Biblical Hebrew. Based on the Commentaries of Samson Raphael Hirsch. Feldheim Publishers, Jerusalem & New York. [6] Andrew Bruce Davidson [1916]: An introductory Hebrew grammar with progressive exercises in reading, writing and pointing. Clark, Edinburgh. [7] Christopher Ehret [1995]: Reconstructing Proto-Afroasiatic (ProtoAfrasian): Vowels, Tone, Consonants, and Vocabulary. University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles. [8] James Q. Foster, Lane Foster Harrell, Esther Raizen [2004]: The Hebrewer: A Web-based Inflection Generator. CALICO Journal – The Computer Assisted Language Instruction Consortium, 1, n¡3, pp. 523-540. [9] Isaac Fried [2004]: The Analytic and Synthetic Etymology of the Hebrew Language. The Hebrew Etymology Project, USA.
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[10] Heinrich Friedrich Wilhelm Gesenius [1813]: Hebr´’aische Grammatik. Neudruck: Hildesheim 1983, Georg Olms Verlag. English Translation: E. Kautzsch, Gesenius’ Hebrew Grammar. Clarendon Press, Oxford (1910) & Dover Publications, Bilingual edition (2008). [11] Heinrich Friedrich Wilhelm Gesenius [1952]: A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament. Oxford University Press, USA. [12] Yitzchak Ginsburgh [1992]: The Hebrew Letters: Channels of Creative Consciousness. Gal Einai Publications, Jerusalem. [13] Russel D. Gray, Quentin D. Atkinson [2003]: Language-Tree Divergence Times Support the Anatolian Theory of Indo-European Origin. Nature 426, pp. 435-439. [14] John Huehnergard [2011]: Proto-Semitic Language and Culture, The American Heritage dictionary of the English language, 5th ed., pp. 20662078. [15] A. Vanlier Hunter [1988]: Biblical Hebrew Workbook: An Inductive Study for Beginners. University Press of America, Lanham, Maryland. [16] Jan Joosten [2012]: The Verbal System of Biblical Hebrew: A New Synthesis Elaborated on The Basis of Classical Prose. Simor Ltd, Ein Kerem, Jerusalem. [17] Johannes Kepler [1997]: Harmonices Mundi. Godefroi Tampachus, Frankfurt & Linz (1619). English translation: The Harmony of the World. Translated into English with an Introduction and Notes by E. J. Aiton, A. M. Duncan, J. V. Field. Memoirs of the American Mathematical Society, Philadelphia (1997). Traduction francaise: L’harmonie du monde. Traduction de Jean Peyroux, Librairie Blanchard, Paris (1979). [18] Gary A. Rendsburg [2007]: Ancient Hebrew Morphology. In: Morphologies of Asia and Africa, by Alan S. Kaye, ed., Eisenbrauns, Warsaw, Indiana, Chapter 4, pp. 85-105. [19] Erik Serracino-Inglott [1968]: The Trilitterality of Quadriliterals in Semitic Maltese. JMS 3, pp. 47-67. [20] Pavol Stekauer, Rochelle Lieber [2005]: Handbook of Word-Formation (Studies in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory). Springer Verlag, Berlin. [21] Shemaryahu Talmon [1995]: The Hebrew Bible as Inspiration in Culture (Introduction). In: The Old Testament as Inspiration in Culture. International academic symposium, Prague, pp. 12-22. [22] Edward Ullendorff [1971]: Is Biblical Hebrew a Language? Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, 34:2, pp. 241255. 7
[23] Eugene Wigner [1960]: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences. Communications in Pure and Applied Mathematics 13, No. I. John Wiley & Sons, New York. Edouard G. BELAGA Institut de Recherche Mathématique Avancée de Strasbourg 7 rue René Descartes, F-67084 Strasbourg Cedex, FRANCE e-mail:
[email protected]
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