Ventrue said:
I haven't read too much Browning, but what does "A got leave an ox to be, No camel, Quoth the Jews, like G" mean?
I think Uncle Al is making the point, in a cute Victorian way, complete with Victorian poetry quote, that, as Edge said, "it is what it is."
Language is arbitrary and conventional. There is nothing inherent in the little pixels that make up what you see here--"cat"--that equates to a small, furry living thing that makes lots of noise until you open a can. Because we all read English, we just agree to that meaning by convention.
With Hebrew (and other ancient, culturally important languages, like Sanskrit, Arabic, and runes), people may have trouble remembering the arbitraryness of it. It is the language of the gods. How can it be arbitrary?! It must be FULL of meaning!
And it is. Because not only do you have letters of an alphabet that makes up words, each letter also means a word--aleph means ox, and gimel means camel. And each letter is also a number. It's a very short step from there to gematria. Words that add up to the same number might (must?) have some related meaning.
BUT we have to be ready to at least entertain the idea that the meaning involved comes from the human mind and culture and not from some "outside" "supernatural" source.
(Ah, nothing like a little linguistics in the afternoon . . .)