"And the whole earth was of one language,

and of one speech" Genesis 11:1 (KJV)

Very few in this modern world now take the above Scripture passage seriously! Let us take a look at the evidence that support it.

"over 75 percent of English words come direct from Hebrew words"

The above quote was published in 1985 and was based mainly on the work of a Professor Edward Odlum in his work "God's Covenant Man" (1916).

Wait a minute, I have heard people speak in Hebrew, and it sure don't sound like English!! You have got to be kidding!!

But let us take a closer look at the facts remembering that dialects within the same language can make it difficult for communication between even those who supposedly speak the same language. Just a few of the English dialects of today include New Yorker English, Southern drawl, Texan, Midwestern, and let us not forget the English from the "parent" country, Great Britain. No matter which dialect you speak you may have to ask someone with a different dialect to repeat a sentence or phrase before you can understand it! Then how difficult would it be for the same language a few hundred years ago, or a few thousand years ago? I imagine most of us have seen old writings such as those of the founders of our country and noticed that some of the letters look "funny" and some of the words were spelled different. And most of us are familiar with the truism that most of the languages of modern Europe come from one "parent" language. Cannot we then carry this back even further to the possibly most all languages came from one "parent" language?

Over time languages under go a transformation and spellings change, and meanings change, but still many of the basics stay mostly the same. There are certain transformations that take place that most of us are familiar with. For instance when changing a word to the plural or adding ng to the end of a word we often have to make a letter change or add a letter. This is the type of changes that have happened over time as the various languages evolved. Mostly the vowels are to a large part interchangeable when comparing words from different languages and are to be mostly ignored. The original Biblical Hebrew in effect had no vowels, only the constants were of importance.

Also all letters that are pronounced with the same part of the mouth can be considered as interchangeable. M and N are interchangeable nasal sounds and D, T, and TH can be considered as the "same" letter. This is known as Grimm's law, given to us by the same Jakob Grimm who gave us the fairy tales.

It is also common to reverse letters and even in some cases to reverse the entire word.>

Also letters can be dropped or added.

Let us look at the English word "direct". Ignoring the vowels, we have basically a three letter word d-r-ct. By the rules of constant sounds made by the same part of the mouth the following are considered as the same, D-T-DT-TH, R-L-WR, and H-K-Q-KH-G & hard C. Now examine the following figure and notice how various languages have a word that has to do with direct, direction, road, path, pathway, way, track, journey, all related meanings. In nearly all cases the center sound has stayed the same and mostly the first sound has been retained, but dropped by some, and in some cases the last sound has been dropped.

Fig1

Let us also look at a very small sampling of words that have the same sound and meaning in both English and Hebrew in the figure to follow.

Fig2

A student of the Anglo-Saxon language provided some very interesting old Saxon words for a further illustration. These words are believed to be old enough that they would not be corrupted by more modern influences. The table below may seem rather confusing, but remember ancient Hebrew had only 22 letters, all of which were consider as consonants (see Appendix A), therefore we would have a match when we have matched the meaning and the consonants only of the old Saxon word, and considering the interchangeability of the consonants as provided in parenthesis where appropriate. Do we get 100 percent matches? No obviously not , but remember we are examining words whose origins go back many thousands of years, and thus have had considerable opportunity for changes and corruptions.

Fig3

(ref: "A Concise Dictionary of the words in The Hebrew Bible ...", by James Strong)

In his book "The Word" Isaac Mozeson, published by Shapolsky Publishers, Inc. (1989), has documented the connection between English and Hebrew for many thousands of words.

Conclusion: we have documented in a small way the interconnection between English and other languages to the proposed "patriarch" of languages, Hebrew. The references do a much better and thorough job.

It obviously would be much more difficult to show that the Hebrew language was the true language of the time before Babel, but hopefully in the near future there will be found some way to show this relationship as the archeologists make more discoveries. (see Appendix A)

References:

1) "God's Covenant" by Professor Edward Odlum (1916) as referenced in "Missing Links Discovered in Assyrian Tablets" by E. Raymond Capt, Artisan Sales (1985)

2) "The Word" by Isaac E. Mozeson, Shapolsky Publishers, Inc. (1989) (You may want to visit his web site at http://www.homestead.com/edenics )

Appendix A: Keys to Hebrew

(ref: "The Word" by Isaac E. Mozeson, Shapolsky Publishers, Inc. (1989))

The Alphabet and Derivatives