Sunday, March 4, 2012

Amen



I know you did not come here looking for a language lesson, but that is what you get today.

By the way, I think we can safely ignore the red line ... I really do not believe that Microsoft thinks this word is misspelled or that the workers there can pick their own noses without a book of instructions to guide them.

The above pictograph is a word. The script is from an alphabet (or, more properly, an "abugida") which serves numerous living and dead languages from an area of ancient civilization. The language, spelled phonetically in our alphabet according to the way it is pronounced within itself, is "amarinnia". I have no phd in linguistics or etymology so I certainly do not have the authority to insist as I do, that this is the closest living language to "Aramaic", spoken across the ancient world before and during the time of Jesus.

With just a little bit of imagination, you can probably even see the word "amen" in those figures above. This is not accidental, for although the script with its 460 plus different characters at first appears mighty strange, it is in fact also derived from that same basic set of stick figures which was first scratched in stone somewhere in the Sinai desert and became the basis for greek, roman, and even arabic writing.

The word itself will also sound amazingly similar to a very common english word, at least in some circles.

It is a verb and in that language the verbs are conjugated with an enormous array of pronoun-similar prefixes and person-dependent subject and object prefixes and suffixes ... in fact the result is so very many that no one ever writes them all down together.

Here's a few, spelled phonetically in our character set:

mamen
amenhu
yamenallhu
yamenewall

Do they sound a bit like words you have heard?
Words that maybe, you might be very very familiar with but you might really be put on a spot if anyone asked you to define them???
This verb means "to believe".

Is it all coming clear now?

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