Hebrew and English are two very different languages. Both are a mess when to their linguistical history and the influence other languages have had on their development process, yet both also preserved the core distinctive features of the family and branch they belong to. And nothing demonstrates this better than the main method for constructing words in each language.
One of the best ways to demonstrate the difference between Hebrew and English (or between Semitic languages and European languages in general) is to show how important vowels are in English versus how relatively insignificant they are in Hebrew, particularly when comes to the sematic value of a sequence of consonants.
For example, let’s take the English words ‘vast’, ‘vest’ and ‘visit’. They are all based on the consonants V, S and T but their meanings are completely unrelated. Same goes for clever, cleaver and clover; bread, beard, bird, bard, broad and board; card, cord, curd, crud, crude and creed; strong, strange and string, and I could go on – words that share the same three core consonants yet their respected meanings have nothing to do with each other.
In Hebrew it goes the other way. When a word shares three consonants with another word, chances are they are also semantically related somehow, regardless of what vowels are in between the letters. For instance, words with the sounds כ-ת-ב (k-t-b/v) are all related to writing; words with the sounds ל-מ-ד (l-m-d) all have something to do with learning and studying; words with ר-ג-ש (R-G-SH) express the idea of feeling, emotion or excitement, and so on. This is not a bug, but a feature of Hebrew roots and their conjugation system.
For English speaking Hebrew learners this feels weird and unintuitive, but there are some sets of English words that behave in a similar manner.
Take the words ‘stop’, ‘step’ and ‘steep’. They all contain the sounds S-T-P and are all linked at some degree to the same basic idea. A step is a movement consisting of moving and stopping your legs, and when an incline is too steep it compels you to stop. We could also lump in the word ‘stiff’ into the group and pretend that just like in Hebrew, the sounds of P and F are closely related.
Similarly, we can take the words ‘still’, ‘stall’ and ‘stale’. They all contain the S-T-L sounds, and all are linked to the idea of not moving. Obviously, there is no way to explain why S-T-L is also found in words like ‘steel’, ‘stool’, ‘style’ and ‘steal’, but at least with ‘steal’ we get to demonstrate Hebrew logic again with ‘stole’.
By the way, it is probably not a coincidence that both of of these group of words begin with the ST sound. We talked about here:
Primal Hebrew Roots – Theory and Examples
In the first article of my Substack, which was about the Hebrew letter Alef (א) and its possible connection to the Hebrew word for ‘a god’ אל and to the concept of force, I briefly mentioned the hypothesis of primitive two-letter roots in Hebrew. Well, I got a pretty good feeling it’s going to come up again in future posts, so we might as well get it ou…
So there you have it, two sets of English words that sort of behave like Hebrew when it comes to preserving their core meaning after a vowel change. It’s not much to begin with and there is nothing scientific about it but trust me – when I introduce these examples to new Hebrew learners their eyes light up with a warm sense of familiarity and suddenly the task doesn’t seem so daunting.
Can you think of other sets of English words that behave like this? I would gladly add them to my list.