Rollin Thanks for your reply. Generally languages do not add things like case systems. Also the fact the case system exists in Arabic and Akkadian and Ugaritic and remnants of it exist in the other Semitic languages tends to indicate strongly it was a feature which was slowly worn down and discarded within the languages that no longer have it. I don't think there's a single case of a language just spontaneously forming a case system. It's something which is intrinsic within the language, and which would be very difficult to integrate at a later date. And it's not even necessary for language, so generally languages do not create features that they don't need, when they got by fine without them before. It's for this reason that I also believe that language is God given, since the complexity within it could not have just evolved out of grunts and snorts as the evolutionists would have us believe. I also think it's most likely the Semitic languages were the original languages too, but Hebrew simply isn't the pristine form of a Semitic language, no matter how you look at it. It is far from it.
Also you completely left off addressing the issue of phonology. Hebrew phonology is very different from the original Semitic phonology, and has lost in all about 7 different letters from it's repertoire. An interesting point is that the exact same merges which occur in Hebrew, Aramaic etc. can be seen in spoken vernaculars of some Arabic countries today. thaa is merged into sin or taa and thal is merged into dal or zayin (as in Aramaic and Hebrew respectively). A big problem for those who consider Hebrew the original language or even original Semitic language is that once Ugaritic was discovered, the evidence was overwhelming and now corroborated, even though many Semitists already realised Arabic was much more conservative long before then anyway. Since Ugaritic agreed completely phonetically with Arabic, yet the two languages are quite distinct. Ugaritic shares much more in common with Hebrew as far as vocabulary and language style go, yet phonetically and grammatically it contains the almost the exact same range of letters and grammatical complexity we see in Arabic. Since the two languages were so far apart in time and distance, the only possible explanation is that they both retained close to the full set of Semitic sounds. Sabaean (Sheba) and other southern Semitic languages also confirm these findings. We also have the early Greek translations of the Tanakh, which tranlsliterate some words with the original sounds, exactly as they appear in Arabic and Ugaritic. For instance, in Hebrew ghayin and ayin have merged, yet at the time of the early Greek translations they must've still been pronounced separately, since the Greek transliteration of words containing the ghayin phoneme in Arabic and Ugaritic, render it as gh from Hebrew as well. Another thing to keep in mind is that Arabs, even the non-Ishmaelite ones were descendants of Eber as well, so technically they were "Hebrews" as well if we are to accept that etymology of the word. Although in my opinion the word Hebrew does not come from this person's name, but from the verb in both Arabic and Hebrew (and most other Semitic languages) ayin-baa-raa which means to "cross over". As the Hebrews were the desert nomads (Arabs if you will) that "crossed over" into Canaan/Egypt and settled there, out of the original bedouin homeland of the Semitic peoples in the Arabian peninsula. Regards, Abu Rashid.
