B-Hebrew: The Biblical Hebrew Forum

I have reactivated my website:
http://www.hebrewetymology.com/
on which my book is to be found in its entirety.

Isaac Fried, Boston University

If I may ask a few questions about this:

1) How long did it take you to write this? It's 1116 pages. Quite a tome!

2) Where did you first encounter the basic concept of seven primitive concepts in language? Is this something you conceived of alone, or did you read it somewhere?

3) Have you presented this to anyone who wasn't a mathematician to get his/her feedback? Have you ever met a linguist or hebraist who thought that these concepts were well presented and correct?

Thanks for putting the information online.

Jason,

1. It took about forty years of thinking, reading and studying, and then about twenty years of writing.
2. Look at the bibliography for the idea that the Hebrew root is actually a compound. Eventually I came to see language as but expressing the duality of to be one and to be many.
3. Look at the thing with an open, unbiased, mind and judge its validity in your own mind. You need no "linguist" nor "hebraist" to tell you what is right and what is wrong.

Isaac Fried, Boston University

Isaac Fried wrote:1. It took about forty years of thinking, reading and studying, and then about twenty years of writing.

Should I assume that your thinking began when you were a babe, or did those forty years begin when you were already an adult, assuming at around twenty years old? Did you complete writing when you were sixty or when you were eighty? Just curious. You've devoted all of your adult life to this theory of language?

Isaac Fried wrote:2. Look at the bibliography for the idea that the Hebrew root is actually a compound. Eventually I came to see language as but expressing the duality of to be one and to be many.

Duality of being one and of being many? Language is nothing more than this?

Isaac Fried wrote:3. Look at the thing with an open, unbiased, mind and judge its validity in your own mind. You need no "linguist" nor "hebraist" to tell you what is right and what is wrong.

I tend to look at things and ask, "If this is true, what would be necessary to establish it? If I assume it's true, does it produce contradictions with what I already know? Are those contradictions superable?" This is how we think of everything. Hebrew is not a new thing. It's a long-established language, and linguistic data are gathered from comparison of various languages. We cannot assume a framework to be true without testing it. That's basically what you're asking us to do.

Jason asks
Should I assume that your thinking began when you were a babe?

Yes. My mother was a "hebraist", a Hebrew teacher, and whenever I showed signs of grouchiness at age five she would say
יצחק, אתה היום חמוּד או חמוּץ ?
which has put me on the right trajectory for life.

Jason asks
Duality of being one and of being many? Language is nothing more than this?

Yes! This is the ultimately reality, the basic laws of verbal communication. Think of English: it has the reality markers 'am, be, is, as, add, of, on, all, at, it' and then 'or'.

Jason says
We cannot assume a framework to be true without testing it. That's basically what you're asking us to do.

Yes! this is the ultimate understanding of Hebrew in particular, and possibly language in general.
Think about it for some time.

Isaac Fried, Boston University