Hebrew Key-Letters

Abstract

This article uses mostly ignored facts about Hebrew to propose a major addition to the theory of the Hebrew root (and root-morphemes generally), and a radical solution to the lexical problem in linguistics: the fact that native speakers of a language acquire and subsequently access tens of thousands of words (and that knowledge of a significant part of these words is required of foreign learners). Initial single-consonant submorphemes are proposed as a new (quasi-) systematic structure within lexicon, most clearly seen in Hebrew. More specifically, it is proposed that 16 Hebrew initial consonants provide a semantic clue to the meaning of the root, in the form of a small set of basic meanings (one "original" one branching out to several basic ones). These clues help to learn and access a large vocabulary, whether for the native or non-native speaker.