The Holy Tongue - Source of All Languages Part 2 - Linguistics & Etymology

[@icya6175]

Excellent thank you Rabbi - shared

[@SamuelAbelow]

Brilliant lecture

[@DoreenBellDotan]

I think that new comes from נבע

[@mattnewhouse1781]

Has always been such a fascinating subject.....Murray gell-man, r.i.p. , mentioned a team of Russian scientists researching common ancestor of languages a decade ago. We already know the answer.

[@masajhn]

Very interesting , I really like languages.

[@Yeruch]

You had some great insights. If anyone wants to see more on this subject of Lashon Hakodesh, Rabbi Reuven Chaim Klein wrote a beautiful really in-depth book on Lashon Hakodesh ( it talk about its linguistic history along with the hilological, Kabbalistic, and Halachic approaches different leading authorities have taken on the subject). You can find on book on the publishers webpage: mosaicapress.com/lashon-hakodesh-history-holiness-hebrew

[@DoreenBellDotan]

B"H Why do you say was created? It should be: is created. Please see Isaac Mozeson's research that he called Edenics.

[@7200beverly]

The rabbi is familiar with the book "Edenics."

[@therandeydenyah]

Yaffe!

[@gwen6622]

oh my god this is so flawed and so coincidental, you cannot even try to justify that Mandarin Chinese or Thai or Australian Aboriginal languages or Xhosa or Japanese or Nahuatl or Navajo come from Hebrew, which isnt even that old a language. You know we can trace the origins of the languages that happened BEFORE hebrew, right? this is such utter unscientific nonsense.

[@7200beverly]

The Rabbi lecturer is a linguist and has done much research into this topic. You are welcome to ask questions. This is a serious topic with a lot of evidence and merit.

[@gwen6622]

I am also a linguist, and this is completely indefensible, and fundamentally misunderstands everything we know about historical linguistics. There is absolutely NO chance that Hebrew was even close to the first language, and thousands and thousands of languages exist today that have NOTHING in common with Hebrew... at all. I don't know how he conducted his research, but it just doesn't hold up once you look past a couple consonants sounding similar in various words for donkeys. I'm sorry but this is bullshit. Goodbye.

[@kavikv.d.hexenholtz3474]

Even if one looks at the Nostratic/Proto-Nostratic hypothesis, the Afro-Asiatic languages comprise just one branch of this proposed proto-language. Afro-Asiatic (from whence Hebrew derives) is not the 'base' language family for Nostratic. People's gods spoke the language of the people, if that makes sense. To the ancient Hebrews, God spoke Hebrew. In my neck of the woods, the Creator spoke Abenaki. It's ethnocentrism and very common with ancient peoples. I have to agree with other posters - this argument, though interesting, just doesn't stand.

[@gwen6622]

Hebrew was not the original language. it comes from Proto-Semitic, which comes from Proto-Afro-Asiatic, and so on. to say that hebrew was the original language is absolutely ludicrous, extremely ridiculous, like saying that baseball is the first ever sport. preposterous.

[@gwen6622]

@@punchforpound2808 that's so absurd lol. your argument that maybe every language descends from Hebrew is "some rabbis believe it, and they're pretty smart"? is that really what you're going with? you think that Mandarin, Japanese, Swahili, Icelandic, Inuktitut, Mongolian, and every other vastly different language descends from a language that has very little in common with them... because some other guys think so? like, you'll have to prove that lol. what do Hebrew and Korean have in common, huh?

[@gwen6622]

Hebrew is an interesting language, and certainly it's very old, but it's not even the oldest language we know about. there were languages unrelated to Hebrew that existed before, during, and after Hebrew. do you think that people in ancient China spoke Hebrew? if so, why didn't they write in it? why did they write in Chinese if they were speaking Hebrew? what about Sumerian? was that just a kind of Hebrew? despite having nothing in common with Hebrew grammatically?

[@gwen6622]

there are written Chinese records that date back 200 years before the first proto-Hebrew inscriptions that we know about. they weren't written in Hebrew, lol. Hebrew didn't even exist yet

[@gwen6622]

and of course, Sumerian predates Hebrew by two thousand years. there are written Sumerian inscriptions that exist 2000 years before Hebrew. Sumerian and Akkadian did overlap, and Akkadian is a language related to Hebrew (though also predates Hebrew), but it's more like a cousin of Hebrew than a parent. anyway, the world is far bigger and far older than you know. doesn't that diversity fascinate you more than trying fruitlessly to make spurious connections to Hebrew words does?

[@gwen6622]

@@punchforpound2808 there isnt an other side of the argument, this isnt up for debate lol. it's like saying that the sun is cold. (it isn't, and it doesnt really need to be debated)

[@Sorin5780]

This is ridiculous!

[@gwen6622]

the hebrew language and alphabet is no more special or unique than any other language

[@gwen6622]

Greek and Albanian are Indo-European languages. I'm only 7 minutes in and there are already so many errors.

[@7200beverly]

Yes they are. Please do your homework. Indo-European languages have several "branches." Greek may have its own branch, but it is still Indo-European. It is indeed a very large family of languages.

[@gwen6622]

7200beverly Yeah, and this guy said that Greek and Albanian were considered by linguists to be "isolated languages", not related to any other language. That's what this Rabbi said. This is what is known in linguistics as "wrong"

[@7200beverly]

They are only isolated languages from what we know today. The Rabbi has his own theories about Greek, Albanian, and even Basque. All of these languages come from some "proto" language. It is just that today not all linguists agree as to their precise placement in the family of languages.

[@gwen6622]

7200beverly except uh... they do... Albanian and Greek fit into the same family that English and Latin do... totally traceably and reconstructably... Basque, I'll grant you, we haven't been able to trace its origins. ESPECIALLY not to some totally unrelated and distant language like Hebrew.

[@7200beverly]

Yes, it is difficult to "reconstruct" languages for which we have no traces. This in itself, however, does not invalidate the belief in Monogenesis. This is, nonetheless, a fascinating topic, especially if it can ever be proven to the most demanding of linguists...

[@gwen6622]

Irish is not related to Hebrew in the slightest. Not at all.

[@7200beverly]

The Irish spoken today does not appear to be related to Hebrew. This lecture is about the "origin" of languages. You would need to learn linguistics to see how languages evolved to find similarities among them.

[@gwen6622]

7200beverly Yes, and Irish is in the Celtic family, which goes back to Proto-Indo-European. Hebrew is part of the Semitic family of languages, which go back to Proto-Afro-Asiatic. Different families.

[@7200beverly]

You don't seem to grasp that the objective of this series it to expound on "Monogenesis." An hour lecture cannot give you the full flavor of how languages evolved. If you wish to understand this topic on a deeper level - you will find many sources that support its foundations.

[@gwen6622]

7200beverly many sources... but none of them established linguists. the people who actually study this stuff for a living all would find this absurd. yeah, sure, i think it's pretty probable that there was one original human language. probably something like 50,000 or 75,000 years ago, when humans first evolved. i wouldn't be surprised if we had language when we were all still in africa. but then we migrated out and settled all around the planet, and languages changed. and over that much time... tens of thousands of years, and with written language only appearing fairy recently, historically speaking... we have absolutely no way of reconstructing what Proto-World would have sounded like. by the time of the first written language, every language on earth had probably gone through so many sound changes that their entire sound system was replaced several times over by then. think of how different french is from latin, in terms of the sounds. lots of similarities, but a number of notable differences. and that's just in the last couple hundred years. imagine 75,000 years of language evolution. there is no conceivable way that we know anything about the language of that time. this rabbi is preaching linguistic pseudoscience in order for it to cleverly fit into his archaic worldview, and not accurately describing a well-researched, revolutionary scientific theory. long story short, he is dead wrong, and spreading misinformation. good day.

[@7200beverly]

The main reason you have trouble with this subject is that you don't give any credibility to the Torah (Jewish Bible) and its account of how languages evolved. If we stuck only to scientific methods in the study of language we would not get too far, as you yourself indicated. Perhaps you should begin by asking yourself if the Torah account is correct than we at least "partially" know how languages started.