Oh sorry just to make myself clear I am not talking about modern Hebrew because obviously that was created in the late 19th century. Anyway here is some more proof.
Hebrew is the oldest language to have entered our era. Its alphabet was formulated more than 3,500 years ago and it is the only colloquial spoken language based on a written language. Hebrew, along with Arabic and Amharik, is a Semitic language. It was spoken by the Israelites in Canaan, west of the Jordan River. The western dialect of Aramaic supplanted Hebrew around the 3rd century BC.
Biblical (Classical) Hebrew—12th to 2nd century BC. Scholars agree that the oldest form of Hebrew is that of the Old Testament poems, especially the “Song of Deborah” in chapter 5 of Judges.
While I’m still inclined to doubt the premise, I’ll let that go for a moment, because the conclusion does not follow. How is the fact that previous languages were not alphabetized (if they weren’t) relevant to the source of the words? Even supposing that some ancient Hebrews came up with the idea of using phonetic letters rather than abstract pictograms to represent their language, would they then have abandoned their entire language and re-written their dictionary with brand-new words in the new symbolism? It seems to me that they would have changed the representation of their existing vocabulary instead, a vocabulary which (like every other recorded language) had roots in one or more older languages/dialects.
No offense, but just so you know, it’s usually considered good form to post links to citations you’ve pulled off the Web, so that others can read the context at their leisure. To do that, you can simply paste the URL into your post, or you can use vB tags. Quote this post to see how I do it. The original message that you quote comes from here, and refers to a question on whether on not Hebrew is the world’s oldest language.
In any case, I think you’ve misunderstood how language works. First, language is not the same as writing. Simply because a language is not written down doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. In fact, “Writing has only been around for 6,000-8,000 years. Language has existed for as long as homo sapiens has existed, at least 100,000 years. (here).” More to the point, Hebrew, or any other language, did not spring forth fully-formed at the time it was first written down.
Second of all, having a written language based on phoenetic letters doesn’t preclude adopting words based on other languages whose written forms are non-phoenetic. For example, off the top of my head, “chop suey” has made its way into the English language from Chinese.
Third of all, and most telling, I found this: “Hebrew is related to Arabic so before Hebrew and Arabic there is known for sure to have existed a language we call *Proto Semitic. This language is prehistoric and therefore, by definition, not known to have been written. But it is known for sure to have existed. (cite [italics in original])” So there is, most definately, a pre-Hebrew language.
Fourth of all, Sampson does not at all imply that Hebrew is the first language to use written phoenetic characters. It may be, and actually it would be interesting to find out, but what you’ve quoted above does not support that conclusion.
Fifth of all, just for reference: “So far as we know, the first language ever written down was Sumerian, … shortly before 3000 BC. However, Egyptian was written down almost as early… Hebrew was not written down before about the eleventh century BC at the earliest – around 2000 years later than Sumerian and Egyptian. (cite)”
Sorry to hijack the hijack, but I’m still waiting for lex999 or anyone else to show that two Hebrew words equivalent to “abra” and “cadabra” were ever used in print anywhere at any time to mean a magical phrase.
No further substantiation, really, is given in any of the pages. Not that this list means anything about anything, but I thought it was interesting that there were so many different theories (and the list above is limited to the ones stating that “abracadabra” came from Hebrew) that different people believe.
Hebrew (and the West Semitic languages in general) were not the first languages to be written phonetically; they were the first languages to be written alphabetically. Because of the heavy use in these languages of ablaut, the older cuneiform syllabary was simplified by using the consonantal signs only. This scheme was not practical for Greek, and so Greek introduced vowels when it adopted the alphabet. (Vowels were also added to Hebrew, as the old language became less intelligible.) All alphabets since then descend from Greek.
In any case, the OED states, with absolute correctness, that English got "camel"from Latin, which got it from Greek, which got it from some Semitic language (Hebrew and Phoenecian are named as possibilities).
Ooh ooh ooh. Gotta share this pdf file. This appears to be an undergrad research paper on the origin of “abracadabra”. It comes to no particular conclusion, really, but it does discuss the use of the word at some length, and gives like 20-30 different possible origins, from multiple languages, of the word. I’ll note that there doesn’t appear to be any attempt to weed out the specious origins from the more reasonable ones, but the very fact that so many origins have been published is in itself interesting. Not a bad reference to get a sense of the variety of claims, here.
So, yeah, “abracadabra” is the “OK” of the ancient world.
Hey, to answer the last question posted the whole nine yards. as far as I know there isn’t a word for yards in Hebrew but I will check it out anyway the closest translation I can offer you now is:
‘Kol Hatisha Meterim’ meaning the whole nine metres. However regarding the name of the film with Bruce Willis, the name given was:
‘Lechet ad hasof’ - meaning to go the whole way.
I hope that answers you question.
Now, to John Kennedy, how do you know for certain that OED has the correct translation???
‘In any case, the OED states, with absolute correctness, that English got "camel"from Latin, which got it from Greek, which got it from some Semitic language (Hebrew and Phoenecian are named as possibilities).’
