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Arabic origins of IE languages | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Philological Room |  | |
| robarb Nonaglot Senior Member United States languagenpluson Joined 5056 days ago 361 posts - 921 votes  Speaks: Portuguese, English*, German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, French Studies: Mandarin, Danish, Russian, Norwegian, Cantonese, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Greek, Latin, Nepali, Modern Hebrew | Message 9 of 11 27 May 2015 at 5:59am | IP Logged | ||
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Jassem's position may be fully laughable, but similar types of etymological reasoning have been used to support
less outlandish hypotheses. For instance, Martin Bernal's Black Athena used speculative etymology-hunting to argue that a massive proportion of Greek words and place-names were derived from Egyptian and Semitic sources, contrary to mainstream historical and linguistic analyses. He doesn't argue that Greek is an Afro-Asiatic language, but only that the majority of items that aren't clearly Indo-European can be traced to borrowings from Egyptian and Semitic. Yet, the reasoning is similar: centuries of multiple languages offer lots of candidate word forms that can, allowing for some phonological and semantic change, be matched with Greek words. See http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~jasanoff/pdf/Word%20games .pdf for a rebuttal of this more persuasive (and therefore more pernicious, if it is as wrong as most linguists assert) use of squishy etymology. Edited by robarb on 27 May 2015 at 6:00am 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Aquila123 Tetraglot Senior Member Norway mydeltapi.com Joined 5303 days ago 201 posts - 262 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English, Italian, Spanish Studies: Finnish, Russian | Message 10 of 11 27 October 2015 at 3:58pm | IP Logged | ||
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This is of course utter nonense. But the Afroasiatic languages and the Indoeuropean
languages have certain common traits, for example vowel ablaut, in Arabic and older IE stages to a degree that only the consonants carry the basic meaning of a word. On a very deep level these two language families might be related and these properties may originate from the common stage a long time ago. Many will argue that the IE vowel alternations have a well understood origin, being linked to accent patterns. This is true for the quantitative ablaut, but still this ablaut is a very old fenomenon and one does not know how long back it originated. The origin of qualitative ablaut i less well understood, and again it is very old and one does not know how old it is. What is certain is that they are older than the common proto-IE and must hence originate from some deeper prehistoric level. Edited by Aquila123 on 27 October 2015 at 4:01pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Monox D. I-Fly Senior Member Indonesia monoxdifly.iopc.us Joined 5132 days ago 762 posts - 664 votes Speaks: Indonesian* | Message 11 of 11 27 October 2015 at 6:13pm | IP Logged | ||
Somehow that sounds Yu-Gi-Oh! like, especially ZeXaL. Back to topic: Being a Muslim myself, I did believe that the first language was Arabic because that what Adam spoke to God and vice-versa. God must have taught Adam everything's names in Arabic. However when I said to my lecturer during college that Arabic was the first language, he (who is also a Muslim) corrected me, saying that the first language was Hebrew. When I thought about it, it did make sense since Islam is just a newer version of Christian which is itself a newer version of Jew. Now the last time I heard, the first language was Phoenician, or cave painting if it can even be considered a language. I just... couldn't care anymore about these religion conspiracy things. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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