Elephant Tablet found during construction of Cuenca Airport, Ecuador

© 2018 B. L. Freeborn

In prior posts the idea that ancient art describes the events of a great comet impact and an associated crustal displacement was discussed. Support from ancient records then turned to the written word and in particular to the Hebrew alphabet as a method for reconstructing the Indo-European Language.

The Hebrew Alphabet was discussed in these posts previously under the title “A Little Mystery Hidden in the Hebrew Alphabet.”

There are two things that are distinct about the Hebrew alphabet. Five of the twenty-two letters are associated with a pair called an end-cap because they are used at the end of Hebrew words. This makes a total of twenty-seven symbols. Secondly, the alphabet is called an abjed which means it has no vowels.

Additionally, each letter is also a number. The numbers associated with them are 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70 , 80, 90, 100, 200, 300 and 400. Some numbering schemes assign the higher numbers 500 etc. to the end cap letters.

The letters will be replaced by the Latin letters shown in the image for font convenience sake:

Key to the Hebrew Letters and the Latin Letter that will serve to substitute for it in this study due to font issues.

Imagine that all texts were originally written on clay tablets (or worse yet carved in stone) and someone had to collect the clay, make the tablets, write the tablets, bake the tablets and pity the poor soul who had to haul them from place to place. It is easy to conclude lengthy documents required great economy of lettering to facilitate this process and minimize the massive bulk.

With this in mind, in this reconstruction of the Indo-European language, each letter becomes an entire word or more precisely an idea. In contrast to tradition the ‘ea’, the first letter, will be taken to be a short ‘a’ or short ‘e.’ The letter Ayin, marked ‘A’, will be the long ‘a’ of English. The ‘I’ will be  a long ‘I’ or ‘Y’ and the ‘wf’ will be the four Latin letters: O, U, F and W. The multi-purpose ‘wf’ was either used to confuse the novice or was originally some word/sound forgotten with time but probably along the line of wouf or fouw. It is often associated with the sound ‘v’ as well which provides 5 sounds for the 6th letter and recreates the 5-6 noted in prior posts as being important. However, this study shows that over time the B took on the role for the ‘V’ sound of ‘wf’.

Also, contrary to custom each letter typically considered a consonant will automatically be assumed to be followed by a short ‘a’ or ‘e’ so that ‘b’ becomes ‘ba’ or ‘be,’ and ‘d’ becomes ‘da’ or ‘de’, etc.,  The difference between short ‘a’ and ‘e’ is of little importance since their actual pronunciation varies greatly with locality and time. In total contrast to the idea that this alphabet is vowel-less note this means there are certainly four ‘vowels’ depicted by symbols and one assumed to be present if one of the other four is not used.

These assumptions convert the Hebrew abjed alphabet to one with consonants and vowels much more like the modern Latin alphabet. The beauty of this is it removes the necessity of writing every ‘e’ which is still the most common letter used today and thereby substantially reduces the weight of each document written in clay. This is a worthy goal for book maker and reader alike.

Very soon we begin slowly defining the words associated with the individual letters to arrive at the twenty-two basic words/concepts of the Indo-European Language. After that many two and three letter words will be explored which will notably expand the vocabulary before some interesting ancient words are examined.

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Next post on another kerb stone. Next post on alphabet.