Linguistics

He named it Bavel because this was the place where G-d confused the world’s language. It was from there that G-d dispersed [humanity] over all the face of the earth. Noach 11:9

To me, language is life. With language, one can nurture or take a life, build or destroy entire civilizations. Language represents the world inside a human being, the world inside an entire culture.

In the Torah, every letter and word counts. The holy Jewish sages teach that when a word is repeated in the Torah, there is an emphasis of meaning. The original language of the world is Hebrew, the language with which G-d created the universe.

There is an equally palpable enthralment by the beauty of the ideographic Chinese language. A constant tool in helping me trace the etymology of Chinese ideograms, is this.

My brain thrives on the expression of subtle but meaningful nuances encoded in twang, articulation, word choices, sentence structures, idioms and puns.