Saturday, March 26, 2011

A River Snakes Through Washington, DC , or An Apology for Edenics High Standards

Both Sound AND Sense are required to find the Edenic source of a word.

Then, there are two ways that a word may have come into being:

1) Scrambled Edenic,  or 2) a New Coinage ( creatively based on Edenic,

 the human language program.)

 

Many would-be contributors to the Edenic wordbase are disappointed that I insist on a proposed link to a foreign word having both a viable sound correspondence AND a logical lexical, semantic correspondence.


 This is why I do not use 95% of the “variants” in Samson Raphael Hirsch’s (SRH) Etymological Dictionary of Biblical Hebrew (Feldheim Publ., 1999).  5% of them are good, and so most of them got into our word-base before my first hour with the SRH book this winter. The introduction and theory was an inspiration, but the follow-up data is an embarrassment.

 

The dictionary that I edit will have higher standards.  Every possible sound variation of a Hebrew word does NOT render a synonym or antonym (sorry SRH fans), and will not produce more than a few 100 dictionary-equivalents among the world's 6000+ dialects (sorry Edenicist teammates who want it to be word-search game).  It is not that simple, not merely mechanical.

 

Ben-Yehudah’s dictionary (B-Y). defines the verb נבל NaBHaL as to decay or degrade.   It is a bilabial–liquid synonym of  נפל NaPHahL , FAIL-- see “FALL.” At the Tower of Babel there was this BaLaH   בלה  BaLaH (Genesis 11:7) degradation of the language of Eden, not just a בלל BaLaL, mixing up – see “BALL.”  But our only human language program remained Edenic.  Therefore, different groups of émigrés from Shinar-Sumer –later Babel could either scramble the equivalent Edenic word to coin a word in their new language, or (using Edenic) they could coin a new word, thinking creatively, thematically.  

 

For example, let us imagine two groups encountering their first river, and coining a word for it.  One group would use an existing Edenic river word, but of course would scramble it. There are a few "river" words, but a farmer might be thinking "irrigation canal" and thus think  יאור Y’OWR.   Y'OWR reverses in his post-Babel mind to rio (see “RIO GRANDE”).

 

The other, more visual, imagistic group, seeing a river from a height, is going to think “snake,” as in  פתן   PeTeN  (see “PYTHON”).   Thus, (after a nasal shift from Mem/M to N)  they will have a river word like Greek potamus.  The PTM river is found in hippopotamus (the "river horse," with hippos like Latin equs from  עקב [A]Qe(V), hoof…thus horse) and the Potomac River in Washington, DC.

 

And so, I ask present and future Edenicists to forgive me when I won't publish a word-match that merely has good "sound" or "music."  It is great that you have mastered the letter-shifts, metathesis, nasalization, etc. that The Origin of Speeches teaches.  But to warrant publication the proposed match must also have "sense" or "meaning."  One strong enough to challenge, and eventually replace a currently-accepted etymology.

 

It is hard to teach a researcher to think "snake" when working with a "river" word. But it gets more probable as one masters the "sound" rules, improves his/her Biblical Hebrew vocabulary, and begins to get a feel for how that language-culture thinks.

Germans, Romans, Samoans and Eskimos are going to have totally different ways to conceive of a butterfly, never mind more culturally-charged words.

 

Again, only Edenics considers WHY a word means what it does.  Words shone through Edenic light through a wide cultural spectrum will be the fascinating topic of future Edenic books.  To get to that point, though, we need more volunteers working on more languages, getting quality matches of Music AND Meaning.

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Carol Long just upgraded www.edenins.org
Now, make sure that YOUR language list and photo gets added.

Archived posts, Edenics searches + web games: http://www.edenics.net/  
Edenics DVDs, new ed. of book: THE ORIGIN OF SPEECHES (out last weekl). Edenic (Biblical Hebrew) as the original, pre-Babel human language program see our many resources at http://www.edenics.org/ incl. videos in English, Spn., Fr. or Ger.
youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=glWG3coAtEg&feature=related

Posted via email from Isaac Mozeson