Today many theologians and ordained clergy do not know how people can know what they know about ancient Greek and Hebrew; moreover, many people thus would consult a Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance in order to find definitions for ancient biblical words such that someone else has made up the definition. Many thus would wonder how the people that make definitions for ancient words can know what they know about those ancient words, and although I am not a professional linguist I nevertheless have some educated insights into the subject. Overall, I will thus give a brief view into how a person can use etymology through a historical and anthropological linguistic process to arrive at understanding regarding ancient Hebrew and ancient Greek.
Etymology is the study of words in terms of the combined meaning of their many parts, and thus a word like “geocentric” could be decomposed into the parts of geo-(first root), -centr-(second root), -ic(affix). When we compare the parts of the word “geocentric” for example with other words such as “geographic”, we find geo- to be contained in both words as the most basic meaning as this is called a root. The root geo- means “earth” and we know what a graph is, and we find the ending of -ic to mean “the quality of.” Thus geocentric etymologically means the quality of being earth centered, and geographic etymologically means the quality of being formally systemic (graphic) in describing the earth. Overall, words that have common etymological origin shared by the words are called cognates even if they appear in different languages but yet have the same etymological origin in common, and the study of the historical development of cognates as they originate from one world language and thus link back to that language through layers of prior languages and language usage can teach us much about the critical words used in ancient languages.
Ideally a root of a word is the most basic element of the world that describes something that everyone can identify with as referring directly to something tangible or commonly knowable. The fact that many of our English words have roots that came from other languages and that those roots from those other languages often came from ancient languages tells us much about ancient languages through a chain of cognates. For example Geo is a ancient Greek root, and we learn about the meaning of Geo through our use of the root today.
Ideally if a person diligently compared modern languages etymology and then traced word usage through historic writings, then eventually people would arrive at some conception of the ancient languages. The problem is that the ancient Greek language has roots that contain both consonants and vowels whereas the ancient Hebrew language contains roots that only contain consonants so to speak. The ancient Hebrews words had been made by using a set of consonants that would compose a root and then by putting vowels between the consonants by use of markings above the letters words would be developed. Overall, since Hebrew and Greek are thus so completely different linguistically thus we can identify more with ancient Greek from our use of English than what we can identify with ancient Hebrew.
Ancient Hebrew can often be traced historically through Arabic, but Arabic did not necessarily develop completely out of Hebrew. The rather timeless nature of Arabic to often be unchanging can thus teach us about the ancient Hebrew language as the two languages both shared a common linguistic history. Overall, like in the case of Hebrew and Arabic being related through history other languages such as Modern Greek can more clearly give insight into ancient Greek.
The point thus to be made is that having a collection of literature of primary sources that has within it definitions of words can be used to track the historical progression of a word, and the Unabridged Oxford English Dictionary has defined every word in the English language and then has cited every time that the word has taken on a new meaning (with exact date even) throughout the last thousand years of literature. If for example the same type of idea could be applied to all present and past languages, then one big dictionary could be made that would show the development of all languages from the one original language. Overall, despite the complexity that tracing words through history gives us the best way to identify ancient words is to identify the few common roots and then learn how other, often more grammatical, word parts have been applied to the word in order to make it unique.
By using a combination of identifying similar words in other similar languages, evaluating the development of a word throughout a history of major writings, using direct etymological principles, and often by intuition granted through having developing a strong knowledge of a ancient language lexicographers are able to define ancient words with contemporary language. Today professional linguists are almost as rare as a professional logicians, so truly knowing ancient languages beyond a simple Greek or Hebrew class can be very challenging at best. Sometimes a seminary school may have a professor that has both taken linguistic classes and has theological mastery over the scripture, and in such cases such a professor could have valuable insights that even a professional linguist of ancient languages would not have. Overall, in my opinion based upon much evidence I find the ancient Hebrew language to be very transcendental in nature, and the true linguistic principles of ancient Hebrew may be far more mystical than anthropological.
