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A
Ground-Breaking, Brilliant &
Delightful Work
The Origin
of Speeches: Intelligent Design in
Language
by Isaac Mozeson
Lightcatcher Books,
2006, 300 pages, paperback, ISBN:
0971938881
Reviewed by Dr. Eugene
Narrett
As exciting, historically significant
and fascinating as it is, and essential
for the study of language as it is, the
Monogenesis (the shared origin) of all
languages thesis is not often discussed
even in the science or literary pages of
our major media. It is far less newsworthy
than hurricanes, perhaps because, if
treated with the attention it deserves, it
would generate storms throughout academia,
publishing, history and geopolitics.
It is not surprising that this
groundbreaking study is not on the evening
news. Its subtitle, Intelligent Design
in Language is not a la mode. Things
being what they are, the chances that
someone has heard of the Monogenesis of
language, or even the primacy of Semitic
as the source of all phonetic languages is
little greater than their having heard of
the obelisk of Shalmaneser II, the
Mernepta stele, the Amarna tablets, the
Moab stone, or the thousands of
l'melekh ("for the king") seals
unearthed in ancient Israel's fortress
cities.
Thus "Edenics," the research project
from which the book emerges remains
largely unknown and readers will find
The Origin of Speeches to be like
uncovering buried treasure.
We know that fascinating and important
archaeological, historic and linguistic
discoveries are 'back-paged' or buried is
that they all demonstrate the antiquity
and historical centrality of Israel and
the Jewish people, a grave political faux
pas. Beginning in the 1920s, Modernism's
materialist bias entered geopolitics when
the great powers prompted Islam to agree
that Israel should not exist at all.
Edenics is pre-Israel but threatens
the Darwinian and Eurocentric
establishments in academia and diplomacy
that hate the idea that a proto-Semitic
language close to biblical Hebrew forms
the thoughts and language of humankind
from Navaho to Norse.
Making these etymological and
linguistic roots and branches visible and
comprehensible, Mozeson's The Origin of
Speeches: Intelligent Design in
Language is a stimulating and
accessible study for a lay reader; its
riches require knowledge of no language
other than English. More than this,
OOS is endlessly instructive in
demonstrating, 1) the case for the common
origin of language in the ancient Middle
East; and 2) Hebrew's singularly close
relation to the original pre-Babel tongue
that Mozeson aptly calls "Edenic."
As Mozeson notes, "the data in
language, as in astrophysics points to an
initial Big Bang" (8), to dissemination of
language from a single, proto-Semitic
source; why is this not recognized?
Actually, it was until the Romantic era.
Academic phobias about the Biblical
accounts of creation and of human origins,
including language, are mostly 19th - 20th
century phenomena that modern sciences
themselves are dissolving. The notion that
creation, or language are random,
spontaneous or reactive events does not
hold up to the scrutiny of astrophysics,
earth sciences, linguistics or common
sense; the highly emotional indeed, high
strung self-styled 'rationalism' of the
Romantic-Modern period (the neurotic
scientist in Hawthorne's "The Birthmark"
is an epitome) is increasingly recognized
as a historical burp that comes from
eating too much of the intoxicating food
of permanent progress, from schemes for
re-fashioning and ruling human beings and
societies to re-casting regions of the
world: a new Babel.
Mozeson takes us back to the linguistic
situation before and after the tumults
that produced a babble of tongues, a
family with their lineage hidden within
them.
He briefly reviews the many famous
names and peoples who understood the Bible
as a map to the beginnings of wisdom. John
Milton's epics, among much great
literature displayed an encyclopedic
knowledge of the Hebrew Scriptures, of
Jewish oral law and Scripturally informed
history; the Puritans learned Hebrew as
the "pure language" originally spoken;
their burial stones abound with Hebrew
inscriptions; Governor William Bradford
wrote his memoirs (c. 1650) in Hebrew,
"that most ancient language and holy
tongue…in which names were given to
things"; the Presidents of New England
Colleges, including Harvard, gave
commencement speeches in Hebrew into the
1770s; and Noah Webster who compiled what
long was considered the great American
Dictionary listed, accurately, many Hebrew
roots for English words as common as
"lad."
Signs of how pervasive this
understanding and respect were before the
anti-Biblical prejudice clouded the modern
mind appear in literature, too, even in
Romantic skeptics like Nathaniel
Hawthorne. His most famous novel, The
Scarlet Letter is filled with
references both overt and subtle to Hebrew
(Hester Prynne's name and experience),
Jewish history and its patterns (the
return of the 'exiled' Hester's daughter
to her ancestral inheritance) and to
Judaism (Reverend Dimmesdale relies on
"texts of rabbinic lore" to buttress his
theology; the ornamental brick surface of
the Governor's mansion "is covered in
Kabalistic symbols."
We do not see or discuss the
implications of even so obvious references
to Jewish material because our culture and
its teachers have directed our attention
elsewhere. The Origin of Speeches
is part of a cultural re-balancing of the
scales of justice and minds…
Mozeson proceeds largely by applying
"Grimm's laws" of phonetic shifting to
explicate his thesis, noting first that
the linguistic methods that bear Grimm's
name actually were developed by the famous
Jewish sage Rabbi Shlomo Yitzhaki (Rashi,
1040-1105). Mozeson's definition and
demonstration of phonetic changes via
bilabial, nasal, guttural, fricative,
liquid and aspirant shifts are compelling
and delightful. The charts of the earth's
most common words, their resemblance and
manner of transformation between tongues
dispersed widely across the earth make his
case vividly and wondrously.
Like a superbly trained wrestler, the
author grasps the metamorphic magic of
human speech and brings its apparent chaos
into a learned order. His familiarity with
the transformative logic of language
illuminates his discussions of individual
common words as they migrate from Edenic
in chapters that form the body of this
wonderful text. He tracks for us Edenic
ZaNaBH ("tail," Genesis 4:4, the
consonants are capitalized for they are
the bedrock by which language travels) "a
fine etymon (source word) for the voodoo
snake deity named the 'zombie' via the
nasal shift of 'N' to 'M.'" His definition
and discussions of metathesis are
wonderful: we follow Biblical words like
ShaVeT ("staff," "branch") and its
cognate, SHDT ("switch," "whip," Proverbs
26:3) to "switch, staff, swat, and stave."
The derivation of Greek "hedon" and
hedonism ("pleasure") from AYDN, "earth"
from AReTZ (Eretz), or Peru from PRU ("be
fruitful") and AYeF for "sleepy" ("Iowa")
in Sioux are a handful of the hundreds of
linguistic and historical treasures he
unfolds. He memorably tracks the trek of
the Hebrew DeReKH ("way" or "road")
through dozens of languages from Dutch to
Czech to Japanese to Hopi.
Then there's Zygote, the Greek word we
heard in Biology class; it's from the
Aramaic and Hebrew AeeVaiG ("to yoke"), in
this case, chromosomes. One after another
the logic of the most common words tumbles
forth: "cycle, hill, goat, honey, tooth,
collar, girl, helix, Hermes" (the last, an
earth-penetrating phallic Greek garden god
from GHaRaM, "subtle," Genesis 3:1
referring to the serpent that fiddled with
Eve). Mozeson conducts us on a tour of
cultures that draws readers deeply and
pleasantly into the logic of
linguistics.
Along this inspiriting "daroga"
we learn enormous amounts of Hebrew and
other languages and are constantly amazed
at the transportability and common roots
of culture.
An artist of his science, Mozeson
argues persuasively that there is a
musical structure, harmonic and melodic a
well as phonetic logic to language and
that the original Edenic is "a keyboard
for all human music and meaning."
Delightful and erudite, this work
belongs on your nearest shelf along with
Dr. Gerald Schroeder's studies (e.g.
The Science of God) on the amazing
correlations between modern science and
Biblical wisdom, and James D. Long's
The Riddle of the Exodus an
invaluable and lucidly explicated
introduction to and overview of the
archaeological evidence for the
historicity of the ancient Middle East.
Together these texts provide readers with
a wonderful sense of origins and structure
of human existence, societies and
intelligence and begin to amend the
political and spiritual horrors born of
the dogmas made from the theories of
Rousseau, Darwin and Marx and their
followers.
The Origin of Speeches
(Lightcatcher, April 2006, 268 pages)
comes with an E-Word CD Dictionary. Dr.
Mozeson's earlier work in this field was
The Word: the Dictionary that Reveals
the Hebrew Source of English (1989);
it has an animated Power-Point side show
and a CD with 800 pages of material.
Order
at Amazon
-- Order
at Powell's
About
the reviewer...
The
reviewer has published extensively on
American culture and politics and on the
history and geopolitics of the Middle
East. Dr. Narrett earned his BA, MA and
PhD degrees from Columbia University in
New York City. An art critic, artist, book
reviewer, columnist, in recent years he
created, directed and taught in the
Liberal Studies Program at Cambridge
College. He is the author of
Gathered
against
Jerusalem
(2000), Israel
Awakened
(2001), and Israel
and the
Endtimes
(2006).
Visit
Dr. Narrett's Essay Archive in The Radical
Academy
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