Your not telling the full picture. You only showed from some scholar that the word "elder" came from a Germanic word which i cant recall. El is a 4000 year old word, while im sure you will agree your Germanic source is at best 1000 years. Even if we add an error of 500 years that still leaves quite a considerable gap of 2500 years. Im sure you will agree that the Germanic word itself is based on another word from another language and culture. Until we follow that back further and see that it does not converge with the middle east its not appropriate or honest to make the claims you are stating. The question now becomes where did that German tribe get the word from ? What is its origin etc ?
This isn't a mystery. The etymology of the word "elder" is well-known and traceable to Proto-Indo-European through normal linguistic principles. It wasn't borrowed from Semitic; it is a Germanic word meaning "old person, senior, parent" derived from the root meaning "old" (Old English eald, Old High German alt, Old Norse aldr, Gothic altheis), which itself originally had the sense of "grown up, grown tall" (cf. Latin altus "high", Old Irish altae "brought up"), cf. Gothic alan "to grow up", ultimately from a root *al- meaning "to grow, raise, bear" (Greek althomai "grow, heal", althaino "heal", Latin alere "to nourish, rear", alescere "to grow up, prosper", almus "nourishing", Old Irish alim "to be nourishing", altru "nursing father"), etc. You can look this up in any reference work. There is no reason to seek an origin elsewhere. You were led to do so because of a supposed phonetic similarity ("el" in "elder") and a belief that there was an inherent religious meaning to "elder". I pointed out that both these things arose only in the English word; the match of El and elder results from a vowel change that occurred only in Old English (the original vowel sound was "a" as the other Germanic cognates show) and the supposed "religious" meaning resulted from the use of ealder/ealdor to translate Latin ecclesiastical terms like presbyterus, and even then this was only a secondary sense of the word. So there is no evidence to substantiate your speculation, much less any historical linkage with an ANE deity. I already covered all this a year ago.
All languages ultimately are based on earlier languages and evolve, sometimes they substitute certain hard/soft forms of consonents when adopting the word. Eg PTR and MTR as the core consonants of mother and father in latin. Many romantic languages swapped a F for P and we see the same pattern in english. The TH sound has replaced T as well. All i was trying to show in the EL case is that the use of L or R is a common form for god or godly things. L and R are related and often exchanged. We can this pattern in many words where these sorts of consonant swaps happen as if a formula is present in migrating the word.
You are perfectly entitled to indulge in sound symbolism, but this is not linguistics. There is no evidence that the "l" sound alone carries a specific meaning, much less for "godly things". The relationship with meaning is arbitrary (other than instances of onomatopoeia); there are so many words in all the Indo-European and Semitic languages that have this sound (or both "l" and "r" since you regard them as interchangeable, which doubles the number of candidates) that you can come up with almost any meaning you want. I can easily pull together a list of words from Indo-European that "proves" that "l" refers instead to negative, disgusting things.
It is extremely easy to find chance similarities between unrelated languages: http://www.zompist.com/chance.htm. One therefore needs a methodology to distinguish between meaningless chance similarities and meaningful linguistic relationships.
Your statement here I thought was most telling:
I await your reply why the similiarity exists at all ? You have not explained the chance conicidence...
That says it all. You believe chance coincidences require explanations. They don't. But for you, any similarity, no matter how coincidental, is meaningful and requires explanation. I see this tendency often in your posts, where you find persuasive the most tendentious kind of proposed parallels. It doesn't matter how strained or unlikely the parallel is, if there is any imaginable similarity whatsoever, it is meaningful.
I, on the other hand, believe that similarities can happen without any direct relationship (whether through coincidence or through commonplaces), and so additional evidence is often required to assess the likelihood of a relationship.
Really of all the names the two characters could have, its pure chance they are very similar and in one case almost identical ? What are the odds it must be a very large number. The simple answer is of course the newer form(Abraham and Sarah) copied the older one(the Hindu tradition).
I don't find the phonetic similarity as impressive as you. The initial consonant in "Abraham" has no parallel in Brahma, and the parallel with "Sarah" must ignore half of the Sanskrit name. No philologist I know of has suggested that the names are not Semitic but borrowed from an Indo-Iranian language. To substantiate the parallel, I would want to see similarities in role and function, and not just commonplaces. So for instance, if Sarah is based on Saraswati, then I would expect that Sarah is associated with flowing water and wisdom. But this isn't the case. Nor do I find the similarities with Brahma very weighty. But more importantly, I question why you assume that the Hindu tradition here is the older one. In this case, the Hebrew patriarchal tradition seems to be older. The references to Abraham and Sarah in the patriarchial narratives, Micah, and Deutero-Isaiah date to the exilic and early post-exilic periods at the lastest (e.g. 500 BC). Hindu religion was not monolithic but underwent extensive development over centuries. The pairing of Brahma and Saraswati dates to the Puranic period (AD 300-1200), and the Brahma Purana is thought to date to the tenth century AD. In earlier Vedic Hinduism, Brahman was a more general genderless cosmic spirit; Brahma, as one of the Trimurti, was a later mythological development that adopted roles and traits from Prajapati, Brahaspati, and the pair of Yama and Yami. In the Vedas, Saraswati proper was not the consort of any of these deities but was a personified river goddess. Then in the later Vedic and post-Vedic period Saraswati became conflated with other deities, such as Vak, the daughter and wife of Brahaspati/Prajapati, as well as Ila and Bharti. Then when Brahaspati/Prajapati became identified as Brahma, Saraswati/Vak became the daughter of Brahma (note that Sarah was the sister, not daughter, of Abraham). So I am doubtful that any such pairing of Brahma and Saraswati even existed at the time the Pentateuch was finalized, much less at the (possibly pre-exilic) time when the Yahwist and Elohist materials and the underlying oral traditions underwent development.
