Background of the Hebrew Language

[Gregory Matthews]

Comments have been posted in this forum related to the Hebrew language.  I thought that I would post a few that are considered accurate by scholars in the field.

·         Language is a characteristic of the human race as no human group has been discovered that is mute.

·        All languages have descended from one language that is believed to have originated in East Africa.

·        Estimates of the number of languages that have descended from that one initial language range from 6,000 to 7,000+ languages.

·        All languages have existed in a spoken form.

·        Probably about 100 languages have existed in a written form.

·        In the beginning of the written languages symbols used to represent the language included ideographs, hieroglyphics, and cuneiform symbols.

·        With the passage of time, those attempts at writing morphed into an alphabetic script.

·        The languages of the world are divided into major families.

·        The Indo-European family of languages is spoken by 40% of the world population and this family includes the English language, which is a part of the Germanic sub- family.

·        These families of languages differ in vocabulary, grammar, sentence structure and in phonemes.

·        The alphabet that we use to write English today is known as the Latin (Roman) alphabet. As is true for all alphabets, the characters used today in the alphabet have changed from their original characters.

·        The Hebrew spoken today comes from the Afro-Asiatic family and the smaller Semitic subfamily.

·        The written Hebrew of the Bible is written in Aramaic Square Script.

·         It is of interest that the first alphabet was of the Afro-Asiatic language used in Egypt.

NOTE:  My comments above are based in part on the work of Dr. John McWhorter of Columbia University and in part on my understanding of the subject.