Uniquenesses of Hebrew

Question

Franz Philipp Kaulen, S.J. (1827-1907)

was impressed in favor of [ancient] Hebrew by the following facts:

1. In no other language is there such an intimate relation between nouns and their objects;
2. the peculiar Hebrew use of three consonants is based upon a variation of the third letter and closely resembles logical definition by proximate genus and specific difference.*

These important phenomena are especially interesting from the viewpoint of the philosophy of language.

^{—Pohle-Preuss, God the Author of Nature and the Supernatural: A Dogmatic Treatise vol. 3, § "Thesis IV: Our first parents were also endowed with an infused knowledge of natural and supernatural truth"}

^{*For example, "animal" is the genus of "dog" and "man", and "rational" is the specific difference distinguishing the species "man" from other animals. Cf. "classification" in Brody, Boruch A. "Logical Terms, Glossary of." Encyclopedia of Philosophy.}

Are #1 and #2 true only of Hebrew?

Answer 1

The first claim sounds kind of meaningless unless we can define what a noun's "object" is. If so, it will probably turn out to be meaningful but false.

For the second one, if we're understanding the claim right, then see Tristan's comment. In synchronic Hebrew, you can't predict much based on subtracting one letter (the third or otherwise) and trying to find a shared semantic base between the others. But diachronically, before the stage that we would call Hebrew (even ancient Hebrew), Tristan reports, it's argued that there were biradical roots that were supplemented by a third to form some of the roots that would later descend into Hebrew, as well as other Semitic languages.

Hebrew does have some very cool features, but they're not unique to Hebrew.

Answer 2

A word, first, to address, the “specificity of man distinguishing him from other animals” in the light of the truly awe-inspiring (and truly inspired) Hebrew text of Genesis 2.

In the Mosaic-Catholic tradition, which coincides with but does not depend on Aristotelian hylomorphism – but in fact surpasses it by illuminating it with the light of divine revelation (body and soul being reunified in the Resurrection) – the intimate relationship between soul and body also implies the distinction between that which is a spiritual principle (or “breath of [rational] life[s],” נִשְׁמַת חַיִּים/nišmat ḥayim, in Gen 2:7a) and the soul as merely naturally living (נֶפֶשׁ חַיָּה/nêphêš ḥayāh, in Gen 2:7b) and thereby acting through biological processes; in this respect, comparable to the purely natural life animating animals, חיות/ḥayot, so much so that such other animals are in fact also called נֶפֶשׁ חַיָּה (in Gen 1:20, and elsewhere), lit. “living throats” (i.e., living through mere natural respiration), while they are not the receptacle of that divine operation described in Gen 2:7a, by which Adam receives a נִשְׁמַת חַיִּים.

A revelation of paramount importance, but which often goes unrecognized, lost in bad translations (all of them, in varying degrees), and covered with the many projections of modern man on a divinely inspired text he is unequipped to begin to understand, coming from and relying upon the standards of the world misguiding him… Said revelation is this, and it is an irrevocable and truly compelling truth, once the glasses of the world’s mindset (cf. Rom 12:2) and its self-crippling scientism have been removed from one’s face: according to Gen 2:7(a&b), the spiritual life of man comes first; he only becomes a נֶפֶשׁ חַיָּה afterwards – the very opposite of what the modernist chimera of evolutionistic ‘process theology’ would have people believe in blasphemously seeking to reconcile Sacred Scripture with the evolution mythology of naturalistic modern “science.”

Thus, “the specific difference distinguishing the species 'man' from other animals,” according to the Book of Genesis, is נִשְׁמַת חַיִּים. It is wholly consistent with the specific rationality of man’s immortal soul, intrinsic to his spiritual life.

Now addressing #1 (“In no other language is there such an intimate relation between nouns and their objects”) and likewise doing it in the very light of the breathtaking text of Genesis 2 (the text in which we are nevertheless given the true spiritual breath of the divine life within us, ☺), I would like to simply highlight the following, which hinges on a theory of knowledge I contend belongs to revealed anthropology, through the authoritative enlightening testimony of both Sacred Scripture (starting with the Book of Genesis) and Tradition (the Fathers, the great scholastic commentaries and syntheses, etc.).

When Adam originally and effortlessly names (literally “calls out”/יקרא) the quid-dities (מַה) of the animals brought before his eyes (Gen 2:19), his sinless intellect is apprehending the invisible from what is visible. This apprehension is intellection proper (בִּינָה → הֲבָנָה), i.e., the core function of the intellect (which the Fathers render, with the Greek NT, by νοῦς, the distinctive highest operation of which moves from θεωρία to λογιστικόν) beyond both abstract conceptualization and regular cognition (both of which we all more or less easily experience, unlike the first).

The possessive pronoun here (הוּא, ejus) refers to the quidditative form (or archetype) of each נֶפֶשׁ חַיָּה (animae viventis) he (Adam) has the original ability to call by “its name” (שְׁמוֹ/šmo). To emphasize the exact correlation between Adam’s operation of calling each animal/reality by its inner name (ὄνομα in the LXX → St. Maximus the Confessor, speaking of individual types’ archetypes refers to them as λόγοι, re-translating ὄνομα as λόγος) and what the divine Word (in His ars aeterne) has spoken it to actually be, the original Douay adds ipsum in front of est nomen ejus: “the same is its name” (which answers the typical scholastic existence question, an est?, “is there such a thing?,” the answer to which one could also translate simply as: “this is [ipsum est] its name”).

Thus, a careful translation (mine hereafter)

1. seeking to maintain the Hebraic syntax in English;
2. to be intelligibly literal; and
3. conveying the triple polysemy of the word נֶפֶשׁ,

from the last section of the Hebrew text of Gen 2:19:

• “And all that Adam calls it [-יִקְרָא לוֹ] every living form/soul/throat [נֶפֶשׁ חַיָּה], its name [הוּא שְׁמוֹ] that is.”

There is where the “intimate relation between nouns and their objects” correctly pointed out by Franz Philipp Kaulen, S.J., comes from!

Without needing to resort to the deductive exertion of knowledge hard-won after the fall, Adam, the proper scientist and pontiff of Creation, only had to consider the content of what was shown to him by the Blessed Trinity to correlate it, by means of language (preternatural Hebrew), to the imago Dei mirror of his own virginal intellect; and, in so doing, to grasp each shown animal/reality’s inner name or noun (שֵׁם עֶצֶם/ὄνομα), to finally give it its proper rational voice (as a vocalized/נִקרָא name/שֵׁם) in Creation. Indeed, outside of Adam’s word, visible Creation is but a mute display.

As Pascal said (Pensées 201-206): « Le silence éternel de ces espaces infinis m’effraie… » (“The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me…”). Adam/man’s word, echoing the divine Word, is the only voice the universe of sub-rational objects has to be intelligibly reflected in the form of nouns.

As for #2, I would merely point out that a case can certainly be made for the antiquity of some proto-Hebrew and Mosaic Hebrew bi-literal roots “hiding” in tri-literal ones formed at a later stage.

Interestingly, Kaulen also speaks of something akin to “logical definition” in how he explains the phenomenon of moving from one consonantal structure to the other. In Adam’s original state of justice, logic is inherent to his meaning-full use of language. It is built into it as ars cogitandi, the work of the preternatural human intellect mirroring, through the use of names (≡ of quidditative essences) and denotations (semiotics), what may be called the ars dialecticæ divinis (the logical art of divine Creation, the ultimate source of Adam’s certitudinalis cognitionis).