The biggest problem facing a teacher of Hebrew is to circumvent a politically incorrect conclusion by his students: this is not a natural language. Take one example, the root cells. Read on, it’s simpler than it sounds.
In the Biblical Hebrew, almost all words are composed of three-letter roots. There are some two-letter roots where the third letter dropped out, a few very ancient two-letter roots, and a handful of four-letter roots consisting of duplicated two-letter root (like klkl). These few exceptions need not distract us now as we’re dealing with three-letter roots.
So rigid root structure should already raise suspicion in people used to modern languages where roots can be of any length. Add the fact that Hebrew roots are consonant-only; vowels create parts of speech: catav – he wrote, cotev – the one writing (I’m talking of the real Hebrew, not the Zionist language), mi-ctav – a letter, etc. No other language group comes close to this mathematically structured rigidity. But read on for the main thing.
Take a few English words starting with, for example, n+s: nasal, nascent, nash, nasty, ness, nest, nostalgia, etc. Nothing in common between those words. But marvel at what happens in Hebrew: n-sh-v – to breeze, n-sh-hey – to forget, dislocation (the sense of fleeing away, gone with the wind), n-sh-m – woman (soft wind-like fluidity), n-sh-c – to bite (cf. to kiss, related to mouth breezing), n-sh-l – to throw out (to blow away), n-sh-m – to breathe, n-sh-ph – to breathe at someone, cool weather, n-sh-k – to kiss cf. breathe), n-sh-r – eagle (from, to peck; cf. hover, move fluently with breeze), n-sh-t - to dry (to blow the vapor away). The common meaning is unmistakable: fluidity.
What does that mean? Quiet simple, that the Hebrew didn’t appear through evolution. Someone has consciously created Hebrew words by adding a third letter to the two-letter root cells (such as making n-sh-k from n-sh root cell). What’s more, this means that our “caveman grammarian” had the alphabet at his disposal when creating words, whereas the normal process is the opposite: alphabets crystallize from spoken languages. The presence of alphabet means that Hebrew was a written language from the beginning; it did not pass through the standard stage of spoken-only language.
Hebrew did not appear from nowhere. Its concepts are traceable to the Ancient Egyptian and proto-Semitic. But at some point of time, someone has built a new language on their basis. The language was not for Jews only: Moabites used it, too. The language wasn’t static but continuously evolved along the preset grammatical rules. But it couldn’t appear naturally.
The Hebrew has yet another way of forming roots: concatenation. Simply, a root xyz would be made of xy+yz root cells. Such process is also anything but natural evolution of language.
Even the two-letter root cells (such as n-sh) are not arbitrary, but carefully made out of two letters, each with its own meaning. That meaning is harder to discern but, for example, letter nun relates the sense of gentle, feminine, fuzzy.
This is why the Modern Hebrew is so ugly. No wonder, a language conceived by a yeshiva drop-out Ben Yehuda, filled with foreign borrowings which garble the otherworldly beautiful language. Being told about a woman, you expect someone different from a 300-pound McDonald’s creature. When I see the word “bank” in Hebrew, I expect it to be related to b-n – son and n-k – cavity. The Hebrew name for “bank” would be straightforward, cespon from ceseph, the place of money.
Hebrew language is possibly the greatest weapon against leftists. Think of this carefully. If you need proof of God, this is it.
