Linguistics

I think the first would be "Snagaag" but not sure about the latter. He was right though, lmao

Words in semitic languages, unlike indo-european languages are conjugated with a system of roots and templates.

Roots are three (or even four) letter words, that are not meant to be used by themselves since they are equivalent to the infinitive in IE languages. So K-T-B would be "to write" and nothing else. No tense, no gender, etc etc.

Templates fill these in, by applying the root to a template. They specify the tense, gender, x-person etc.

So K-T-B (to write) + _A_A_TU (I did this thing in the past) = KATABTU

tl;dr: roots are verbs and templates are context for them

Think for a moment in English.

• I sing /sɪŋ/
• I sang /sæŋ/
• I sung /sʌŋ/
• a song /sɒŋ/

Note what's happening here: the basic meaning of the word is dictated by the consonants, that stay the same across multiple words. Then you change the vowel to convey further meaning: present vs. past vs. participle vs. noun.

In English this is a bit of an exception, but your typical Semitic language (as Arabic and Hebrew) does this all the time, typically following certain patterns. For example, extending OP's example:

You do see some affixes here and there, like that -tu in katabtu. But the workhorse of the morphology are those vowel changes.

And since this system was already present in Proto-Semitic, you can even find cognates across Semitic words, and they'll conjugate? decline? in similar-ish ways.

It's a beautiful language but overwhelming. Even i as a native speaker still find it hard to read books in it (tbf i don't use it much for reading and writing, i do most of that in english lol)

The writing system's also cool. Hebrew is also a pretty language imo but the pronunciation is... let me put it this way: It's the danish of the middle east lmao.

Interestingly enough i can understand a pretty good amount of hebrew despite never really learning it except just to read the script itself. In tiberian pronunciation it has many similarities. Hell, i can even kind of understand the torah.

Proto-Indo-European had a similar-ish system, that was used far more extensively than in modern IE languages. What you see in German and English are leftovers of that system.

Proto-Indo-European had a similar-ish system, that was used far more extensively than in modern IE languages. What you see in German and English are leftovers of that system.

As he said, but i'd like to add: semitic languages are much more preserved than IE languages. for example, i myself can understand ~40% of maltese and basic hebrew, despite never trying to learn either of those languages. Ablauts are an old system so german/english etc have split far off and the words, while having a lot of resemblance might not be almost identical like Shams and Shemesh (sun in arabic and hebrew) But roots are still alive any well in semitic languages.

lol i just threw a name, that's how i save my files. i didn't know imgbb showed them but i was too lazy lmao