Aunt Sally Smith, whose original African birth name is Redoshi (c. 1848 – d. 1937) was a West African young girl from Benin, West Africa. In 1980, at the age of 12, Redoshi was kidnapped from her homeland by colonizers and smuggled to the United Sta…
Aunt Sally Smith, whose original African birth name is Redoshi (c. 1848 – d. 1937) was a West African young girl from Benin, West Africa. In 1980, at the age of 12, Redoshi was kidnapped from her homeland by colonizers and smuggled to the United States by ship. After surviving the nearly three-month overseas ship voyage, Redoshi was sold into slavery and lived out her life in the state of Alabama.
80 years later, in 1936, Redoshi spoke in her native language, Bantu, with a visiting African Academic in Dallas County, Alabama at the age of 90.
Amelia Boynton Robinson, a prominent Civil Rights activist observed the conversation when visiting the former slave, according to her memoir “Bridge Across Jordan.”
Scholars and linguistics experts have noted remarkable similarities in Bantu language grammatical structures and vocabulary that may suggest distant linguistic connections. These similarities compel us to revisit history to hopefully trace when this obvious convergent evolution occurred.
Approximately 500 unique Bantu dialects that you find in Africa today are one or more dialects of Ancient Paleo Hebrew. https://youtu.be/H6FnLz3n0Pw?si=6VwT6ua9JayfR_Lc
That is why they still speak Paleo Hebrew even today. The Berber languages of North Africa and the Cushitic languages spoken in certain regions of Sudan and the Horn of Africa are distantly related to Hebrew.
According to Roy Mitchell, Ph.D. ABD Anthropology & Linguistics, University of California, Berkeley --- Modern Hebrew, while the language is Semitic through and through, the phonological system is based mostly on Yiddish, German, Polish, and Russian. So it does sound more European than Arabic, or any other Semitic language for that matter.
Which language is Hebrew most similar to?
Arabic in all its forms and dialects.
Maltese
Amharic, Tigre, Tigrinya
Neo-Aramaic, Judeo-Aramaic - very few native speakers
Samaritan - descended from Coele-Syrian Aramaic, very few speakers left
Syriac in all its forms and dialects - nigh extinct as a spoken tongue but used in liturgy
The Berber languages of North Africa and the Cushitic languages spoken in certain regions of Sudan and the Horn of Africa are distantly related to Hebrew.
Reference Sources:
1. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/03/us/transatlantic-slave-trade-last-survivor.html
2. https://www.history.com/news/last-slave-ship-survivor-redoshi-clotilda
3. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/04/03/redoshi-last-known-survivor-us-africa-slave-trade-identified/3353769002/
