Hebrew Phonetic Origins of the Yamato Language

What follows is an explanation of the sound transitions from the original Hebrew to what can be found in the Yamato language.

One of the really amazing things I have found in investigating the words, is that although there have been phonetic changes of the sounds associated with the underlying words over the millennia (all languages undergo sound changes over time, e.g. Grimm's Law, some of Grimm's changes we can see in the Yamato language as well), semantically a great number of words still have the same meaning as they did three millenia ago prior to the fall of the Northern Kingdom. Unlike Urartian, Ancient Hebrew has a wealth of resources to draw from in studying the ancient language and the semantic nuances of the words as they were written.

A Note on Vowel Sounds

When comparing the vowels employed in the Ancient Hebrew literature, which was preserved by the Southern Kingdom of Judah, with the Yamato vowels, we find discrepancies with the vowels being used. What the literature of the Southern Kingdom does not take into account is the fact that with the establishment of the House of Omri there was a large influx of Phonecian culture on the Northern Kingdom. This influence was not just limited to religion and arts, but also to the language as well.

In his paper, A Sequence of Vowel Shifts in Phoenician and Related Languages, Joshua Fox describes how the languages surrounding the Phoenician region underwent a series of vowel "shifts". These shifts affected the language of the Northern Kingdom, but did not Southern Kingdom, and is the reason why in many cases the vowels we see used in the Yamato words do not match the vowels used in the literature of the Southern Kingdom.

E.g.

Southern Kingdom		Nothern Kingdom
a	->	o
o	->	u
u	->	i
etc.	->	...

Another point of note, is that the Hebrew script only had consonants and no vowels. The Massoretic vowel system had not yet been created, so it is normal to expect drift from the original vowels that were employed in the original text. This is in fact what happened to the vowels we see in the Yamato language.

Old Japanese

The other thing to note is that Old Japanese, which was spoken in Japan prior to the start of the Shogunate era, had more vowels and consonants than Modern Japanese currently has today [A History of the Japanese Language, Bjarke Frellesvig, p.31].

There are also words that are related to the original Hebrew but have undergone what I will call "semantic drift" from the original meanings of the words. For example, the word "nakam" in Hebrew means "vengeance" or "revenge", but the Yamato word "nikumu" means "to hate". Obviously, revenge wouldn't be sought when there is no hatred. So we see how the original word "drifted" to a different meaning in the Yamato language. There are a very large number of these types of words, which I will likely not put into the Dictionary but may comment on as Blog posts.

Since the topic of discussion is Yamato words, to the extent possible, I have made a concious effort to omit any Kanji-based words of Chinese origin. A large part of the Japanese vocabulary now includes a significant number of Kanji-based words which are read using the ON-yomi reading, whereas the native Yamato words are read with KUN-yomi. ON-yomi based words will not help us here, so these have been eliminated.

Word Constitution

A typical Hebrew word has 3 consonants (C) with 2 vowels (V) inserted in between these consonants.

CV-CV-C

In Urartian, a word rarely ends in a consonant. So a vowel is typically appended to that last consonant of the word (or inserted if there are two consonants butting against each other). The pattern becomes:

CV-CV-C + V

This is the pattern for all Yamato words with one exception, words ending with the letter "n" (which apparently was introduced when Chinese characters came to Japan). So a Yamato word will typically have 3 syllables, all ending in a vowel.

CV-CV-CV

Manyogana

Many scholars have looked at the words transcribed in the Manyoshu and have found consistencies with characters associated with the various Yamato syllables. The main thing to note is that even Old Japanese, which was written down on paper over a thousand years after the arrival of the Yamato tribes to Japan, there were more consonants and vowels in use than what we find currently in modern Japanese. This may also account for why many of the sounds for the words in modern Japanese no longer reflect the original Hebrew sounds.

Letter Transitions

The below table are the list of consonant transitions I have observed during the course of compiling the Etymology page. The evolved sounds and the consonants that eventually replaced the original Hebrew depend largely on where within the word the consonant falls. I will go into detail of the evolved sounds in future Blog posts, but the important thing to keep in mind is that the modern Japanese pronunciation of the consonants has changed from the original sounds resulting in furcation.

Hebrew Letter		Japanese Consonant		Hebrew word	Meaning	Old Japanese	Modern Japanese
b	->	h, w, y or m		baqer	seek	pakaru	hakaru
g	->	k, h or m		gahah	to depart, be cured or healed	kaheru	kaeru
h	->	h, f, k, g, b, y, r, w or omitted		naham	to groan, be troubled, worried	-	nayamu
d	->	d, t, ts, ch, z, or r		dagar	to gather together	-	takaru
z	->	z, s, sh, t, ts, ch		zoth	that one	sotsu	sotchi
ch	->	k, g, r		chad	one	-	kata
l	->	r, w or y/u/i/a/n (at front of the word)		layela	night	-	yoru
p	->	h, f, w, y or omitted		pada	deliver	-	watasu
ph	->	b, w, m, n, h, f, r		kaphar	cover over	-	kaburu
ts	->	ts, t, s,sh, z		tsa'aq	cry out		sawagu
q	->	k, g or h		qatsa	scrape off	-	kezuru
sh	->	sh, s, ts, j, ch or z		shegiah	error	chigahu	chigai
s	->	s, sh, ts		sagah	prosper	-	sakaeru
t	->	t, ts		talah	hang	-	tareru
k	->	k, g		kachal	paint	-	kaku
m	->	m, b		mezeg	mix	-	mazeru
n	->	n, m, d, r, w		nagar	flow	-	nagaru
a	->	a, i, o, h		ani	I		ono
a	->	a, u, e, o, b, h, w, k, g or omitted		arah	bare	araha	arawa
th	->	d, t, ch, ts, s, z		teshuah	salvation		tasuku
y	->	y, u		yam	sea		umi
r	->	r or a/o/e/u/y/h/n (at front of word) or omitted		razah	become thin	yasu	yaseru
w	->	w, u		wazar	feel guilty		ushirometai

Syllabic Transitions

To expand upon the above mapping, the table in the Etymology page will cover examples of phonetic changes that occurred in the transition from Hebrew at the syllabic level. I will also be covering the Hebrew to Yamato sound transitions in detail in the Blog section.

Verbs

Hebrew has two tenses, perfect and imperfect: where perfect describes anything completed in the past, and the imperfect describes anything that is happening or hasn't happened yet. Japanese is the same, in that there's no such thing as a future tense. English speakers first learning Japanese will invariably ask, "how do I express doing something in the future", like saying "I will do ...". The answer being that of leveraging the infinitive of the verb which is the same as the present tense. It takes time to wrap one's mind around this concept. Japanese inherited this from Hebrew.

In general, Yamato verbs are derived from the third person masculine singular form of the Hebrew verb. This form is the base from which the Urartian inflections are applied to derive the Yamato verb conjugations.

Sound and Meaning

There are two great sources that cover the relationship between sounds and meaning in the Ancient Hebrew and Japanese. Although the authors of these works focused on their specific language domain, their work serves as an invaluable reference for the relationship sound and meaning in the Hebrew and Japanese languages. These are The Ancient Hebrew Language And Alphabet by Jeff Benner and Prof. Masamichi Watanabe's two books The Origin of Japanese and Learn Japanese from Etymology By cross-referencing them, it becomes very apparent that the sounds found in the Yamato language derive from Ancient Hebrew origins as the meanings behind the derived consonants are exactly the same as the original Hebrew.

I have provided a full cross-reference list of examples against Benner's Parent Root List on the Etymology page.

And there you have it, the enigmatic origins of the Japanese language. I have really just scratched the surface here, and there is more work to be done to get a full depth of understanding of the language spoken by the Cimmerian branch of the "House of Ghomri". I am also curious to know the implications of these findings in the other Ural-Altaic languages, as I have found Hebrew words in all of these languages as well. But for now, I will focus on Japanese.

Conclusion

Having said all this, the question arises: so are the Japanese people Jewish? Well, not exactly. We understand that the biblical record that those returning from the Babylonian exile were from the tribes of Judah, Benjamin, Simeon and Levi who were the remnants of the Southern Kingdom of Judah. In fact, the word "Jewish" comes from the name of the tribe which lead the Southern Kingdom, which was Judah. The Northern Kingdom was lead by the tribe of Ephraim, one of the sons of Joseph, whom Israel adopted as his own. By the time of the end of the Babylonian captivity, the descendants of the tribes of the Northern Kingdom had already expanded north and were riding their Urartian and Median horses as a horde along the Eurasian Steppe, finding respite in the wilderness, and eventually forming the many nomadic confederations renown throughout history.

Unlike Judah, which lay desolate for decades after the Babylonian conquest, the land of the Kingdom of Israel was immediately repopulated, after the Israelite deportation, by people from other cities of the Assyrian empire. These people became known as the Samaritans or the Kuthim in Hebrew. The tribes of the Northern Kingdom were kicked out of their land and essentially had no home to go back to, short of attempting to reconquer the land. And though they defeated Sargon and the Assyrian army in battle while they were en route to campaign against Tabal (map), the Assyrian empire still existed and could exact retribution if they returned to the land of Israel. Which is why it makes sense that they would head north on horseback to an uninhabited region where no empire would harass them. Taking up a nomadic lifestyle, living in tents, and preferring to remain mobile rather than sedentary. Some did stay, and suffered defeat at the hands of Esarhaddon and Ashurbanipal. But for those that departed when the going was good, it is likely that the victory at Togarmah ("which has been identified with the Tul-Garimmi of the Assyrian inscriptions, which was situated in Komagene"^*) left an indelible impression on those that followed, harkening to the day they were set free from the yoke of Assyria. In the Kojiki, the place (plains of Togarmah situated in "Kommagene") is described as the birthplace of the gods, which is probably how elevated they must have felt after defeating the most powerful army on the planet and exacting revenge only two decades after the carnage of Samaria. It is conjectured that the Turkic tribes derive their name from the place of this great campaign which may also have brought association to the supreme deity in subsequent generations instead of the tetragrammaton.

The descendants of the Scythian branch of the Northern Kingdom ended up settling in Europe and North India, whereas the descendants of the Cimmerian branch settled predominantly in Asia. Some even made it to the ends of the earth, which is how we end up finding Hebrew words embedded in the Japanese language. The Japanese, and many of the peoples of Europe and Asia, are descendants of those who survived the Assyrian captivity. They come from the so-called "Ten Lost Tribes", known in the Tanakh as the "House of Israel". With them of the Cimmerian branch are the Mongols, Tibetans, the Tungustic tribes, the Turkic tribes, the Yeniseian tribes, Koreans and many of the other nations of Asia. This confirms the statement made by Moses concerning the sons of Joseph, who would be responsible for many of the mass migrations throughout the ages. The berakah given by Israel concerning them. How they would prevail over Assyria after the fall of Samaria. That they would grow into a multitude in the midst of the earth and fill the nations. It also explains why some still live in tents to this day. That they dropped off from both the biblical and historical record as being children of Israel is I guess par for the course for being deemed "Lo-ammi". But there's always the hope that the prodigal son and his companions can be grafted back into the family at some point.

From the western Cimmerian branch in Europe are the speakers of the Uralic languages which also seem to have a distant relationship to Japanese. Upon deeper investigation of these languages, one also finds a plethora of words which stem from Ancient Hebrew origins, which is why I believe these nations are also of Cimmerian descent. Since the focus here has been on the Cimmerians and one of the languages which descended from them (i.e. Japanese), I have steered away from the Indo-European languages descendent of the Scythians. The Scythians picked up the proto-Iranian language while in Media. The history of the Scythians and the descendant Saka tribes is deep and quite a number of new findings are being made in the field of genetic research which seems to point to the Scythian origin of many North-Indo-European peoples.

Although the historical record has the events in reverse chronology as it relates to the Cimmerians and Scythians activities on the Eurasian Steppe, there are some indisputable facts:

• they were horseback riding mounted archers;
• they interacted with the Assyrian empire at its later stages and were agents of its demise;
• they lived in tents and had a nomadic lifestyle;
• they were mobile and moved around with horse and cart;
• there is documented archaeological proof of their existence and activity on the Eurasian steppe;
• and all of the activities surrounding them in the Assyrian archives are depicted subsequent to the fall of the Northern Kingdom of Israel.

For me, the conclusion to be derived is that the Cimmerians and Scythians were descendants of the survivors of the Northern Kingdom.

The current history books would have us believe that people living in Japan over two millennia ago were running around barefoot and in loincloths with no semblance of sophistication. But in looking at the vocabulary of the Yamato language and the depth of the culture even at that time, we find that this is very much not the case. The Japanese nation was seeded by a very sophisticated society of people with already a very deep and rich culture. To this day you still find strong correlations of the customs and behaviours exhibited by the patriarchs that are deeply embedded in the Japanese culture and mindset.

My hope in putting this information together has been to show that that which was foretold in the written word has indeed transpired. That the Japanese people are among the descendants of the Northern Kingdom of Israel as can be clearly seen in the Hebrew vocabulary that is embedded in the native Japanese language. And that many of the peoples of Asia who also descend from the same stock are part of Ephraim and his companions. For those that are curious, I'm hoping that it sparks some interest into the further investigation of these matters as they relate to history, genetics, linguistics and archeology.

Please feel free to contact me at contact@yamato-language.org