So English's origin is Hebrew

Setanta's right, ps2huang; either your source was nonsense, or you have completely misunderstood it.

English grammar and vocabulary was originally Germanic; the structure of "Old English" as spoken and written between 600 and 1100 A.D. was very similar to that of modern German and Dutch. The language was then hugely modified by French, because for about 300 years after that, after the Norman Conquest our entire ruling and literate class was French-speaking, and by Latin, because for more than a millennium the language of educated people was Latin. But there is no Hebrew element in English grammar. None.

This mixture of languages has made the language rich, though this does make it difficult for learners. Because of it, English has a huge vocabulary, since many concepts in English are represented by words from each language: for example, if you want to say that someone or something is "like a king" you can use a Germanic word (kingly), a French word (royal) or a Latin one (regal); and each of these words has a slightly different nuance. There are also a number of cases where words of different origin and different meaning coincidentally have the same spelling and sound: e.g. "fair". (The adjective fair meaning "beautiful, equitable, light-coloured" is Germanic; the noun fair meaning "a gathering to buy and sell things" is from Old French.)

The only shred of fact in your post is that the idea of the alphabet was invented around 2000 BC by foreign workers (either slaves, mercenaries or guest-workers; we don't know) in the Egyptian Empire, who had the idea of taking some of the symbols of Egyptian hieroglyphics, which in Egyptian writing represented words or concepts, and using them to represent sounds instead. All the alphabets of Europe and the Middle East were developed ultimately from this invention; Hebrew is just the oldest one of these currently in use.

You do have a point that the "Latin" alphabet that we use isn't very well adapted to the sounds of English (since the Romans devised it in order to write Latin), and it might be easier for everyone if we had adapted it a bit more so that we had a proper letter to represent each of the common sounds of English, as the Russians adapted the Greek alphabet, adding extra letters for the sounds of their Slavonic language.

Setanta's right, ps2huang; either your source was nonsense, or you have completely misunderstood it.

English grammar and vocabulary was originally Germanic; the structure of "Old English" as spoken and written between 600 and 1100 A.D. was very similar to that of modern German and Dutch. The language was then hugely modified by French, because for about 300 years after that, after the Norman Conquest our entire ruling and literate class was French-speaking, and by Latin, because for more than a millennium the language of educated people was Latin. But there is no Hebrew element in English grammar. None.

This mixture of languages has made the language rich, though this does make it difficult for learners. Because of it, English has a huge vocabulary, since many concepts in English are represented by words from each language: for example, if you want to say that someone or something is "like a king" you can use a Germanic word (kingly), a French word (royal) or a Latin one (regal); and each of these words has a slightly different nuance. There are also a number of cases where words of different origin and different meaning coincidentally have the same spelling and sound: e.g. "fair". (The adjective fair meaning "beautiful, equitable, light-coloured" is Germanic; the noun fair meaning "a gathering to buy and sell things" is from Old French.)

The only shred of fact in your post is that the idea of the alphabet was invented around 2000 BC by foreign workers (either slaves, mercenaries or guest-workers; we don't know) in the Egyptian Empire, who had the idea of taking some of the symbols of Egyptian hieroglyphics, which in Egyptian writing represented words or concepts, and using them to represent sounds instead. All the alphabets of Europe and the Middle East were developed ultimately from this invention; Hebrew is just the oldest one of these currently in use.

You do have a point that the "Latin" alphabet that we use isn't very well adapted to the sounds of English (since the Romans devised it in order to write Latin), and it might be easier for everyone if we had adapted it a bit more so that we had a proper letter to represent each of the common sounds of English, as the Russians adapted the Greek alphabet, adding extra letters for the sounds of their Slavonic language.

I am frustrated, why didn't they borrow from Chinese since most common spoken language is Mandarin and Chinese history had a enomous history.

I am not trying to be racist, but I really do have a serious problem to understand the concepts Jewish are thinking of. In my opinion, Jewish people's logic tend to have to do with god or whatever.

ps2huang wrote:

What concepts? Can you be more specific and give examples as to what you do not understand?

The concept of the alphabet might have been developed by the Hebrews but that is, by no means, certain. Most modern linguists credit the Phoenicians of Northern Africa. And that is absolutely all that modern European languages owe to Hebrew (if, indeed, they owe anything) -- the concept of the alphabet which was adopted and modified by the Greeks, and later further modified by the Romans. The alphabet which almost all European languages use today (Russian is an exception), the one we are using now, is a further modification of the old Roman (Latin) alphabet.

Latin alphabet, also called Roman alphabet most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world, the standard script of the English language and the languages of most of Europe and those areas settled by Europeans. Developed from the Etruscan alphabet at some time before 600 BC, it can be traced through Etruscan, Greek, and Phoenician scripts to the North Semitic alphabet used in Syria and Palestine about 1100 BC.

Language existed long before writing, emerging probably simultaneously with sapience, abstract thought and the Genus Homo. In my opinion, the signature event that separated the emergence of palaeohumans from their anthropoid progenitors was not tool-making but a rudimentary oral communication that replaced the hoots and gestures still used by lower primates. The transfer of more complex information, ideas and concepts from one individual to another, or to a group, was the single most advantageous evolutionary adaptation for species preservation. As long ago as 25,000-30,000 years BP, humans were painting pictures on cave walls. Whether these pictures were telling a "story" or represented some type of "spirit house" or ritual exercise is not known

The Chinese and their descendants in the Far East followed the path outlined above in that their original writing was pictorial, then stylized. Gradually their symbols became less and less representational and more abstract. Now Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Mongolian, and other languages of the Far East are written with the use of ideeographs. An ideeograph, or character, represents not a word but an idea. Some well educated Chinese can read Japanese ideeographs, and vice versa, without being able to speak the other language. Poetry is more visual in Chinese and Japanese than it is oral. English poetry is, of course, mainly oral..

In the Middle East, about 3500 years ago, a totally new development in writing appeared. The Phoenicians, the ancestors of the Lebanese, invented an alphabet. Alphabets are different from other writing systems because the symbols represent sounds, not pictures or ideas. Combinations of sounds make up words in all languages, so a set of twenty to forty symbols representing most of the important distinctive sounds in a language could be used to represent the words of a language. The Phoenician alphabet spread into Northern Africa to become the writing system of the Arabs and northwest to Greece. The Greek letters were further modified to become the Cyrillic alphabets of Russia and the Balkans, and the Romans, in their turn, modified the letters into the alphabet we recognize and use, called, sensibly enough, the Roman alphabet. Western European languages use the Roman alphabet, as do the written languages of North and South America which are, of course, European languages.