Q&A: Is Someone Who Knows Only Hebrew Inferior?
Is Someone Who Knows Only Hebrew Inferior?
Question
Hello,
Sorry for the provocative title; I simply genuinely don’t understand.
The English language has an incomparably larger vocabulary than Hebrew—in verbs, nouns, descriptions, and so on.
How can one educate children so that Hebrew will be their mother tongue when this, in effect, de facto causes their inner world to be much narrower? The soul expresses itself through words and expressions, and if it lacks the expressions and words, something in its development is harmed.
You can simply look up synonyms for different words in English—for example beauty, courage, shame, stability, or honesty, and many other very commonly used words. These words have many different variations, and someone who doesn’t know them remains somewhat limited.
And also technically speaking—the English language developed over hundreds of years among billions of people, unlike modern Hebrew, which did not.
Answer
I think reality is smacking you on the head. I’m not impressed that someone who knows only English is broader than someone who knows only Hebrew. Beyond vocabulary, there are connotations and body language and contexts and other nonverbal means of communication. It may be that there is some lack in certain respects that is compensated for in other respects.
But nobody is preventing you from raising your children bilingually. Good luck.
Discussion on Answer
This whole discussion of yours—whether English is more developed or Hebrew—is making me laugh. After all, the most intelligent language is Chinese.
If in Hebrew or English people make do with twenty-something letters, then in the “Great Chinese Dictionary” there are no fewer than 54,678 symbols, each one expressing a different word.
In short: nobody can beat us! We lead both in quantity and in quality!
I bow politely before you,
Ching Chong Chi, Man of La-Wing
Words are only an expression.
To understand nuances, the soul must understand the situation.
And sometimes the soul understands that there is no verbal expression in the dictionary for the thing it wants to express.
What having many words adds is the possibility of trying to understand what separates and distinguishes one word from another, and that can help understanding.
But if you are not trying to understand what distinguishes one word from another, then the size of the vocabulary does not matter at all.
There are enough words in Hebrew that most Hebrew speakers do not know how to distinguish among in terms of their differences in meaning.
And we have not found any difference between those who are foolish in Hebrew and those who are foolish in English. They represent humanity as a whole quite well.
But if there is no broad vocabulary, the distinctions the soul makes between different things are not grasped and remembered—or so I think, at least.
To the questioner, I would note that even the “fact” about the size of the lexicon is not really factual.
First, Hebrew, like the other Semitic languages, is a root-based language, and in many Hebrew dictionaries the words “shamar,” “shimer,” “nishmar,” “hishtamer,” etc. appear under one entry (“shamar”). That does not indicate lexical poverty, but rather a lexicographic method and the structure of the language.
Second, English dictionaries are full of rare or professional terms, and the average educated person knows only a small part of them.
Third, your assumption that a language developing among billions of people will contain a broader lexicon makes sense at the dictionary level, but not necessarily at the level of the individual and the specific dialect.
If you compare the *mental* lexicon of the average educated person, it is not at all certain that you will find a huge quantitative difference.