Language

TOWARD MEANING: LANGUAGE—LINGUISTIC CONSTRAINTS

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Dr. Paul Manuel—2011

To have a better appreciation for what God has revealed in His word, it is helpful to understand how that revelation came about, not only the process of revelation but also the mechanics of recording it (writing, grammar, discourse).

1. Writing (Semiotics)

• Paleography

• Archaeologists have unearthed many inscriptions that date to biblical times, and they testify to a fairly high degree of literacy in Israel.¹ These inscriptions also help explain how our present system of writing developed. To see where they fit in the evolution of writing, we must survey five stages in the development of writing systems.

 1. Stage #1—Pictographic symbols (one symbol = one thing; before 5,000 BCE)

• During prehistoric times, people used a picture to represent a particular object (e.g., an ox head = "my ox").

2. Stage #2—Logographic symbols (one symbol = one word; c. 3100 BCE)

a. Later, a picture came to represent the name of that thing, a single word (e.g., an ox head = "an(y) ox").

b. This system was extremely cumbersome because if the basic vocabulary of a language contained 1000 words, writing in that language required as many symbols (most English dictionaries define 50,000+ words). Sumerian and Egyptian (two non-Semitic languages) both used logographs (pictorial symbols). For example, the simple sketch of an ox (or just its head) stood for the word "ox" (e.g., Summarian GUD).

c. As these languages developed, their symbols became more stylized, evolving into the cuneiform (wedge-shaped) and hieroglyphics (Greek for "sacred inscriptions") respectively (Carter 1984:11-12; Naveh 1982:12).

 3. Stage #3- Ideographic symbols (one symbol = one concrete or abstract concept; c. 2900 BCE)

• Eventually, logographs also came to mean abstract ideas associated with the things they represented (e.g., ox head = strength).²

4. Stage #4—Syllabic symbols (one symbol = one syllable; c. 2600 BCE)

a. Realizing the need for a less complex method, Mesopotamian scribes began to use ideographic symbols to represent the sounds of their words in addition to the words themselves. In Acadian, for example, which adopted Sumerian cuneiform, one could read the Sumerian symbol for "ox" (GUD) either as its Acadian equivalent ('alpu) or as the syllable -gud-.

b. This double use allowed scribes to combine symbols in order to represent a wider vocabulary and effectively reduced the number of signs in a language from well over a thousand to a few hundred. The ox symbol (alone or combined with others) could now stand for "ox" as well as for "cattle, hero, young bull> strong, demon, god, to jump."³

c. The expanded use of symbols permitted more descriptive writing but still required an extensive inventory to represent the many consonant-vowel combinations in a language.

5. Stage #5—Phonemic symbols (one symbol = one sound; c. 1500 BCE)

a. Eventually, an even more economical system of writing evolved, one that used a single symbol to represent a single phoneme. This innovation encouraged the spread of writing beyond the professional scribe to the general populace.

• The Egyptians continued to use ideographic symbols (in the simplified scripts of hieratic and demotic) until they adopted a modified version of the Greek alphabet (called Coptic) in the second century BCE. They did employ some of the same symbols for individual consonants though, similar to Acadian's double use of cuneiform signs (Naveh 1982:14-16) but usually only for writing foreign words (Carter 1984:27). For example, the symbol for "mouth" (ra [vowel uncertain]) also stood for the initial sound [r], which could then be used with other symbols to form a word that had no special hieroglyph of its own (e.g., Israel).⁴

b. It was Canaanite (specifically Phoenician) scribes, however, who developed the true alphabet (Carter 1984:32-37). Living on the land bridge between the two great civilizations of Mesopotamia and Egypt, with maritime connections further west, these scribes had the advantage of being familiar with the complex writing systems of the period yet not being hampered by centuries of tradition resistant to change. The simple alphabet they produced had three advantages over earlier and even some later writing systems.

1. The Canaanite alphabet had only 22 symbols (30 in Ugaritic), not hundreds of symbols as in Acadian.
2. Each symbol stood only for one consonant, not for the word or syllable from its former logograph.
3. The special economy of this system was that unlike Acadian (or even English), it did not represent vowels (except Ugaritic alephs) but assumed that a native speaker would be able to supply them without difficulty as he read (as do speakers of Modern Hebrew today).

At first, logographs served as the signs in Canaanite, but only for the initial sound of the words they represented (acrophony). Thus, the sketch of an ox head stood not for the word "ox" ('aleph) but just for the glottal ['] (as in the opening of the throat for the initial sound of "apple").⁵

c. When the Israelites moved into Canaan, they adopted this alphabet. The English alphabet is a descendant of the Canaanite, through the Greek and Latin alphabets (Carter 1984:49-53). Thus, the former ox symbol ('aleph) flipped over and became the closest sounding Greek equivalent: "A" (alpha).

II. Grammer ...

For a pdf including the rest of the paper, an Appendix: "On the Use of the Tetragram," the Bibliography and Endnotes see here.