the Berasit Hebrew Dictionary

In the fields of linguistics and philology, word origins are considered a fun and exciting topic. In order to trace the origins of a word, linguists apply the comparative method to not only the language at hand, but related languages and particularly to previous iterations of languages or dialects. Languages are not isolated entities, but belong to linguistic families – English is part of the “West Germanic” language group, which in turn is derived from the Indo-European family. Many of the words within a language group are similar across languages.

An important part of the comparative method is cognates. Cognates are essentially the same words in different (usually related) languages. As an example: “mother” in English, “māter” in Latin, and “mutter” in German, all sound suspiciously similar. This is because they all evolved from a common word in a previous language that influenced English, Latin, and German. Because of these patterns, it is possible to travel back in time and get a glimpse of ancient languages, even prehistoric ones with no extant written records.

The ancient Hebrew language contains numerous words that are cognate across Indo-Semitic languages, a theoretical language group comprised of the Indo-European language group as well as the Semitic language group.

This is quite interesting indeed, particularly given the fact that most linguists vehemently deny that there is any connection whatsoever between Hebrew and the Proto-Indo-European language group. In fact, many of these scholars have been known to resort to public mockery of the idea which they label as ludicrous, laughable, ridiculous, or completely lacking evidence¹⁾, or worse yet, mockery of the individual bringing up the possibility of such a connection.²⁾

Nevertheless, the ancient Hebrew language does in fact contain a substantial number of words that are far too similar to Indo-European roots to be merely coincidental. This page will document some of these connections.

Early estimates indicate that around 7% of all ancient Hebrew words may be cognate.

analyze percentage of well attested words.

- construct a list and perhaps discuss. For now use the Backlinks