The Origin of Speeches: A Review
The Origin of Speeches: Intelligent Design in Language (2006) by Isaac Mozeson
The Origin of Speeches is one of those texts that cross the boundaries between disciplines and have the potential to change our understanding of ourselves, our culture, destiny and capabilities. As one reads, the discoveries about our uniquely human gift, language, unfold like a cascade of gems, vivid and lucid. It is a ground-breaking, brilliant & delightful work
Monogenesis, the thesis that all languages share a common origin is by now well-documented. Mozeson’s study shows that it merits the designation of a science. But as historically significant, fascinating and essential for the study of culture as it is, it is rarely noted even in the science or literary pages of our major media. Monogenesis is far less newsworthy than hurricanes, perhaps because, if treated with the attention it deserves, it would generate storms throughout academia, publishing, history and even 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.
All of the above (and there is lots more like them) are archaeological discoveries of the past two centuries that demonstrate the antiquity of Israel and the historicity of much of the Scriptures.
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, a key to discovering truths of language, history and human nature and its divinely “designed” nature.
In the modern period, studies that challenge, on behalf of tradition, the dominant ideological paradigms of progressivism tend to be ignored. But some evidence is too juicy to ignore… And this book blazes a trail too intriguing too ignore.
Important archaeological, historic and linguistic discoveries are ‘back-paged’ or buried when they demonstrate the antiquity and historical centrality of Israel and the Jewish people which as current events repeatedly show us is a grave political faux pas. Beginning in the 1920s, Modernism’s materialist bias entered geopolitics when the great powers awakened a slumberous Islam (and countenanced the aggressions of Germany) to abort the rebirth of Israel and decimate the Jews. 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.
Mozeson’s lucid overview of linguistics includes a brief survey of the ways in which the academic, political and media establishments have worked to suppress the evidence for the primacy of Semitic in linguistics and history, burying much as they buried, for seven decades their own evidence that Darwin’s theory was disproved by the geological record.
Unearthing etymological and linguistic roots and branches, Mozeson’s The Origin of Speeches: Intelligent Design in Language is a stimulating and accessible study for a lay reader; its riches require no language other than English. 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,” to the dissemination of language from a single, proto-Semitic source. Until the Romantic era (b. 1780) and its dogma that the human imagination or science would weave new dispensations for socio-political relations based on nature, the linguistic primacy of Hebrew was widely recognized. 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 the creation, or language are random, spontaneous, evolutionary or reactive events does not hold up to the scrutiny of astrophysics, earth sciences, linguistics or common sense; the highly emotional indeed, high strung ‘rationalism’ of the Romantic-Modern period (the neurotic scientist in Hawthorne’s “The Birthmark” is epitomizes the type) is increasingly recognized as a historical burp that comes from eating too much of the intoxicating doctrine of permanent progress, from schemes for re-fashioning and ruling human beings and societies to re-casting regions of the world to make a new Babel.
Mozeson takes us back to the linguistic situation before and after the tumults that produced a babble of tongues, a human family whose lineage is hidden by some readily learned phonetic rules.
He enlivens his discussion by citing famous people 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 and language, of Jewish oral law and Scripturally informed history; the Puritans learned Hebrew as the “pure language” originally spoken by mankind; New England burial stones abound with Hebrew inscriptions; Governor William Bradford of Massachusetts 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 this pervasive understanding and respect 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.”
Academics 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. Thus The Origin of Speeches is part of a cultural re-balancing of the scales of justice and minds… It is part of the re-introduction of divine order to the ‘educated’ classes of the West, and beyond.
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, like so many other basics of western culture actually were developed by Jews, in this case, the famous Jewish sage Rabbi Shlomo Yitzhaki (Rashi, 1040-1105) who codified his predecessors’ work on sound and sense. Mozeson’s definition and demonstration of phonetic changes via bilabial, nasal, guttural, fricative, liquid, dental and aspirant shifts are compelling and delightful. He memorably likens these seven phonemic building blocks of language (“the seven notes of creation”) and its transmission to the notes of the misnamed “octave” (do-re-mi-fa-so-la-ti), to the seven days of the week and the seven lights of the Menorah that symbolizes the orderly and glowing creation. An artist of his science, Mozeson argues persuasively that there is a musical structure, a harmonic and melodic a well as phonetic logic to language and that the original Edenic is “a keyboard for all human music and meaning.”
These helpful and intriguing methods of explication emphasize his teaching that the student of language, in tracking linguistic dissemination and borrowings should track patterns and shifts of these seven basic sounds as much as the letters that signify them in various languages. “Sound and sense” together are a significant part of the design of language, as he repeatedly shows.
One of many vital points to the science of Edenics is that “unique among ancient writing systems, the Torah’s ‘Aleph-Bet’ appears to depict the shaping of each letter in the human mouth, or the air flow necessary to pronounce each letter. This sounds like an intelligently designed system that could be called “the Keyboard of Creation” (80). Mozeson follows this instructive metaphor with a brief and inspired discussion of how the Hebrew aleph-bet shows as well as sounds the seven phonemic categories of music, “the seven-sound keyboard of all human music and meaning.” Two initial examples are the worldwide dental-liquid-guttural pattern for words “road” (from Hebrew derekh) and the guttural-liquid-dental pattern for words denoting the heart, particularly in its literal physical function as the organ that beats or trembles (charod to cardio, etc).
This is just the beginning of an extensive demonstration of the thesis of Edenics. Charts of the earth’s most common words, their resemblance and their manner of transformation between tongues dispersed across the earth make the case for Monogenesis from proto-Semitic, Edenic, vividly and wondrously.
Like a skilled 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. For example, 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 compelling: 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); all the well-known animals of the world, as if they had indeed been named by a single progenitor of us all. 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, and glimpse a world culture based on mutual respect and learning, not on control…
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 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 from the dogmas of Rousseau, Darwin, Marx and their followers. The Origin of Speeches is an essential and delightful text for students of any language, for linguists, historians and human beings who desire, as nearly all of us do, to understand better our place on this world and its — and our — miraculous qualities.
The Origin of Speeches (Lightcatcher.com, April 2006, 268 pages) comes with an E-Word CD Dictionary. His 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. —- EN