גמל
The more we progress technologically, the further we seem to get from the tangible world. Take for example the word “camel.” The word is a bunch of letters combined that have absolutely nothing to do with the sand-dwelling, hump-possessing mammal that has a penchant for spitting. I can only imagine that the word itself comes from the Hebrew word for the same animal,”גמל” (gammel). That word is also the name of the first letter of the word, “ג” and the letter from which we eventually get the letter “g.” Hebrew is an interesting language because it’s a sort of gateway language. It came about during the move from a pictographic form of writing to an abstract one. The letter ג was supposed to resemble a camel. It could then also stand in for the animal and at the same time represent sounds that were similar to the beginning sound of that common animal that is found in the Judean desert. Technology creates new things and new things require us to engage in new relationships, oftentimes in new ways.
The Hebrew alphabet allowed for a bridging between a world that was becoming more and more spread out and that was learning to continually remake itself. This gets me, kind of, to the McGurk effect. English is totally divorced from any tangible connection with the world, and the McGurk effect shows us that that might be a very bad thing. just watch:
In losing the connection that language had to the earth, we have opened up language to be frightfully manipulative.
You might want to check out The Origins of the West Semitic Alphabet in Egyptian Scripts – by Gordon Hamilton – for even further investigations into this topic.
I appreciate you thought provoking final sentence!
Miriam