Customer Reviews

The Word: The Dictionary That Reveals The Hebrew Source of English

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

As I read the first page of The Word, I was thrilled to learn that someone had DISCOVERED the hypothesized Indo-European roots to our modern languages! Almost every language can trace some of its roots to this once dead, but now resurrected language, but in English, 95% of our language is demonstrably traceable directly or indirectly to Hebrew. Even some Amer-Indian words have more than coincidental resemblance to Hebrew. How could scholars have missed the connection? Could it possibly be antisemitism within the ranks of the 19th century German linguists, who introduced the science of etymology to the world? Isaac Mozeson is scholarly, yet entertaining as he traces language roots through the developing sciences of linguistics and etymology. And those who love Scripture and linguistics have a double treat in store.

The book is certainly interesting and worth reading, offering fresh insights into the English etymology. However, it's analysis is definitely not without flaws.

> Some imagination is required to find lip/nose images in Hebrew letters, corresponding to their pronounciation, although the suggestion is daring. Besides, old Phoenician Hebrew letters are quite different.

> If we consider possible wide substitutions, like R-L-N-(M) and work with three basic vowels (or even no vowels at all), add letters' reversal and omission, many three-letter roots are likely to coincide strictly by chance. The odds are only enhanced by the ambiguity of Latin transliteration and sometimes variant writing in Hebrew. Author also feels free to choose the suitable spelling either of modern or ancient English. Allow for the meaning to be not exactly the same, but related, and quite a lot of English words would find their equivalents in the much smaller Hebrew dictionary. Given such assumptions, it's overall plausible to find about a quarter of active English words related to Hebrew roots.

> Common linguistic approach is to analyze transformation of the groups of words, not of the single words. This book apparently lacks such analysis either for phonetical groups or those related by meaning. For example, it stresses the origin of giraffe and skunk words, but not of the animals comprehensively.

> Although the author traces similarities from Hebrew, this is not self-evident. Both Hebrew and English may inherit it from a source language, be it theoretical IE or actual bablit.

> Some very important hypothesis are not elaborated upon. Thus, the author asserts phonetical relation of Hebrew synonyms and antonyms. This is a bold assumption, and would take more than a single pair of words to convince a reasonable person.

This book is simply amazing. It is much more than a dictionary that reveals English has roots in Hebrew (or "Edenics" as the author likes to call it). But more importantly it reveals that other languages have potential roots in Hebrew. It provides actual words as evidence and gives details of roots and concepts. Linguists will undoubtedly hate this book because it dismisses half of their theories. After reading this book, you will begin to wonder and believe that all languages originated from one. Just like all people originated from one family. As time developed languages evolved and differentiated, but a careful inspection can potentially unmask their origin. This is what the author has done with English words originally believed to have etymologies of Latin. The author provides so much evidence (and those familiar with Hebrew can attest) that the reader must either provide alternative explanation or accept the theory. I have started to analyze some Farsi words and have already established the connection of countless words to Hebrew (Even words that are not believed to be of "Arabic" etymology). Scientists and linguists who have formed their ideology and must protect their theories will undoubtedly deny these points until a future time where more brave and advanced scientist all start to see how all languages must have originated from one language (that being Hebrew). Isaac Mozeson is a revolutionary and his theories will one day be accepted.

Very good book! The author is more than adequately trained and familiar with his subject matter. No doubt, most critics with an agenda will strongly dislike this book. With a work like this, one cannot help but realize the accuracy of the Biblical record and the beginning of man and the language of man in the Garden of Eden.

I am presently a student of the Hebrew language, and I would definitely recommend this book to any serious student or truth-seeking scholar.

As a historical linguist specializing in Hebrew and Semitic languages, I can assure you that this book is simply ridiculous. The author makes no attempt at using linguistic method. He simply finds an English word that sounds like an English one and makes up a connection. For example, he posits the Hebrew word for 'roof' (gag) as the source of the English word 'gag', citing involvement of the 'roof of the mouth'. The one star I give is for the entertainment value of the book. It is good for a laugh. Please do not believe anything in the book -- see the Oxford English Dictionary for English etymologies and E. Klein's "Etymological Dictionary of the Hebrew language" for Hebrew ones.

Great dictionary! I love it and recommend it to others who also want to study evidence of the true and original language of Hebrew found within English words.

It is interesting to note how the reviews of this work fall neatly into two camps, viz., rave reviews from persons ignorant of linguistics vice dreadful reviews from persons knowledgeable of linguistics. One would have hoped that an Amazon review page would not degenerate into a shouting match, whereby the happy ignorami can up the "star count" by submitting more essays than the unhappy literati, but hope springs eternal.

Mozeson's thesis is preposterous and his "analytical" techniques are a randomized grab bag of whatever suits him offhand. As a critic from the Ukraine pointed out above, the triconsonantal pattern that underlies the structure of many Semitic word families, plus more than a bit of phonologic license with phonemes that are rather unrelated but--per the "soundex" algorithm, at any rate--are "of a feather," empowers one to draw parallels between anything and anything. To further trivialize Mozeson's "research," Hebrew has only a small set of consonants in the first place--just take a look at, oh, Thai or Hindi, for throat-vexing alternatives!

Spare yourselves from such foolish approaches. If you want to study linguistics, then study linguistics. Mozeson is all wet. As a beloved Turkish engineering professor once taught me, "Not every man who has a mustache is your father."

When God confused the languages at Babel, He didn't do a thorough job. That's the bottom line from The Word by Isaac E. Mozeson. All other languages were confused and all other peoples were scattered, but ancient Hebrew survived in its pure form. And Mozeson claims to have traced modern English words back to their Hebrew roots. Mozeson claims that, in tracing modern words only to Latin or Greek, etymologystops short, instead of taking the last step back to Hebrew. He goes so far as to claim that ancient Hebrew was the language of Adam and Eve, straight from the Garden of Eden. There is much conspiracy theory here: the last hundred years of scholarship in (German) comparative linguistics, Mozeson dismisses as racist and anti-Semitic. But it was not always so: our Puritan forefathers made deep study of Hebrew, and almost made it an official language (they also believed that the Indians were the lost tribes of Israel, but Mozeson does not mention this). Mozeson claims that Hebrew contains subtle wisdom found in no other language; for example, the root "ear" is connected with "balance" - a fact recently confirmed by modern science, but known all along to the ancient Hebrews (or maybe it's because we have one ear on each side?)If you like "The Word", you'll love "Atlantis: The Antediluvian World" by Ignatius Donnely - he and Mozeson were cut from the same cloth.

As a historical linguist, I have examined Mozeson's proposals and samples of his treatment of individual words. I do not deal here with the religious issues that arise but rather with the linguistic evidence and associated argumentation, in terms of what we have learned across the 200 years of scientific linguistic scholarship. The main problem with Mozeson's proposal is the comparative methods which are used, which are long outdated and are now used only by fringe amateurs. The probability of pairs of superficially similar words in apparently unrelated languages having very similar or the same senses by chance is in fact MUCH higher than Mozeson suggests. And in this particular case most of the alleged correspondences do indeed appear to be unsystematic and arbitrary; each correspondence is invoked as it is needed to 'explain' specific forms, but there is typically no good explanation for why different correspondences apply in different cases, or even an admission that this is a problem or an issue that needs to be addressed. It is already known that language change does not occur in this way. Using such methods one can 'prove' (spuriously) that almost any two languages share large amounts of vocabulary. The statistics involved here have recently been formalised by Ringe and other historical linguists, and while there is some debate about specifics the overall case is overwhelming. In addition: (a) in many of the cases cited here, other etymologies are already known or proposed with good evidence; (b) the proposal contradicts a large amount of well-grounded information about the genetic relationships of languages; (c ) the analysis ignores the fact that genetic relatedness (as opposed to influential contact) always involves specific elements of grammar and phonology as well as shared vocabulary. Because of all this, Mozeson's sweeping claims about the derivation of all other languages from Hebrew/'Edenic' are invalid. There have been many other attempts to reanalyse language origins in such terms; they all fail, for the same reasons.

This book is an excellent reference and fascinating explanation of where our words came from and why and how they have traveled from one language to another. I highly recommend this book to anyone who is interested in the history of words and wants to appreciate their language better. In fact, I suppose this book really would interest most everybody.