Semitic languages

Did you know the word train is the word hanach? Hanach is the word to train, and it literally means to put something into the mouth.

A very similar Arabic word, which comes from that same Semitic root.

The Arabs have a word for taking date honey and putting it on the lips and on the palate of infants to stimulate the sucking reflex to get infants to learn how to feed from their mother's breast by putting date honey as that sucking reflex.

That's the word hanakh.

So the reality is, is there are actually several Ethiopian Bibles in translations.

We're going to focus, though, on the one written in Ge'ez, which is an ancient Semitic language like Hebrew that is used within their church tradition, but not in everyday life.

So when I talk about the Ethiopian Bible today, broadly speaking, I'm going to be talking about this particular translation of the Bible found in Ethiopia, written in an ancient language called Ge'ez, which is in some ways related to Hebrew, right? So Without getting nitty-gritty into this stuff, and there's lots of great books, if you're like, man, I want to know more about Northwestern Semitic languages, baby, I can give you some books for that.

But at the risk of making everybody's eyes glaze over, what I'm talking about here is simply saying that Ge'ez is a language that is linguistically similar to Hebrew because of its geographic location.

If you're somebody who knows a couple different foreign languages, you'll know that If you're dealing with even French or Spanish, there's some overlap there with some of these languages sometimes in the grammar and the words because of proximity, right? Words that we have in English, not every single word in English came from England, right? Yiddish words have made their way into English.

Kabbalah or the etymology of that? Of the word? Yeah.

And like tell us about the Semitic root.

Yeah, sure.

So Kabbalah, you get a couple of different interpretations.

It's completely consonantal.

I think it was pretty much early Quran transcription that motivated...

Arabic literature to even adopt these funny little markings to clarify until then it was all you know that's how Semitic languages worked

Yeah, yeah.

I hope you don't serve him at least.

This word mammon is a transliteration of a Semitic word, so Hebrew or Aramaic, that was spoken by Jesus.

And it's a transliteration into Greek.

Okay.

When you see truly, truly, or verily, verily in the King James, that tells you the original language was not Greek.

The original language had to be a Semitic language.

If my wife was talking to me and it was cold out, and I came in and she wanted to know if it was cold, she'd ask me, in Hebrew, and I would say, very cold.

I wouldn't say very cold.

I'd say, cold, cold.

Or if it's warm, I would say, Very warm, cham cham.

You say things twice to give it emphasis or make it a superlative in a Semitic language.

That's true in Persian, it's true in some dialects of Arabic, it's true in Akkadian, it's true in Aramaic, it's true in Hebrew.