Not quite all of them

My hope is that Rose Govar will not take offense if I offer a small emendation to her recent letter on the subject of “Semitism.”

I do not disagree with her point; I just wish she had written “nearly all peoples” instead of her “all peoples who lived in Mesopotamia …”. It brings out my inner pedant, who knows that the Sumerians are not included under the heading of Semitic peoples.

Neither are the Hurrians, whose presence and influence were extensive in western Mesopotamia in the third and second millennia BC. It is thought that the Kurds are their descendants.

But these are quibbles, perhaps, in the face of Ms. Govar’s chiefest thrust which is, if I may paraphrase, that labels dividing us into separate groups are often artificial and rarely helpful.

In the truest technical sense, Arabic and Hebrew aren’t really independent languages so much as two dialects of West Semitic. They use different scripts and pronounce the vowels of many words differently, but I’m going to go so far as to say that in essence, “at first” there wasn’t any difference.

I might provoke a few pedants by suggesting that if America had adopted a different script when she split from Britain, the English we speak today would be distinct from British in about the same degree that Hebrew differs from Arabic.

And let us not forget how badly the speakers of Yankee English and Dixie Drawl have got on together. If they used separate scripts, the secession would likely have been permanent and they would today be mutually unintelligible. These things take surprisingly little time to develop, especially when people aren’t trying to get along.

STANLEY G. JOHNSON

Little Rock