LANGUAGE IN INDIA

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Volume 13:4 April 2013
ISSN 1930-2940

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         L. Ramamoorthy, Ph.D.
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The Arabic Origins of "Animal Terms" in English, German, and French:
A Lexical Root Theory Approach

Zaidan Ali Jassem

Abstract

This paper examines the Arabic cognates and/or origins of animal terms in English, German, French, Latin, and Greek from a lexical root theory perspective. The data consists of about 200 animal terms such as cow, sheep, horse, lion, swine, bird, duck, snake, and so on. The results show that all such words are true cognates in Arabic and such languages, with the same or similar forms and meanings. The different forms amongst such words are shown to be due to natural and plausible causes of phonetic, morphological and semantic change. For example, English sheep comes from Arabic kabsh 'male sheep' where /k & sh/ merged into /sh/. Similarly, Latin bov, Greek bous, French beef, English cow (bull, bullock), German Kuh, Lithuania karve, and Church Old Slavonic krava derive from Arabic baqara(t) 'cow' via different routes, including reordering, shortening, and turning /q/ into /k & s/ (or merging it with /b/ into /v & w/), and /r/ into /l or Ø/. This implies that Arabic, English and so on belong not only to the same family but also to the same language, contrary to traditional Comparative Method claims. Due to their phonetic complexity, huge lexical variety and multiplicity (e.g., 500+ lion words), Arabic words are the original source from which they emanated. This proves the adequacy of the lexical root theory according to which Arabic, English, German, French, Latin, and Greek are dialects of the same language with the first being the origin.

Keywords: Animal terms, Arabic, English, German, French, Latin, Greek, historical linguistics, lexical root theory

1. Introduction

The genetic relationship between Arabic, English, German, French, Latin, Greek and Sanskrit has been firmly established in a good number of papers (Jassem 2012a-f, 2013a-f), which cover the three main areas of language study: phonetics/phonology, morphology/grammar, and semantics/lexis. At the lexical level, the first study was Jassem (2012a: 225-41), which showed that numeral words from one to trillion in Arabic, English, German, French, Latin, Greek and Sanskrit share the same or similar forms and meanings in general, forming true cognates with Arabic as their end origin. For example, three (third, thirty, trio, tri, tertiary, trinity, Trinitarian) derives from a 'reduced' Arabic thalaath (talaat in Damascus Arabic (Jassem 1993, 1994a-b)) 'three' through the change of /th & l/ to /t & r/ each. This led to the rejection of the claims of the comparative 'historical linguistics' method which classifies Arabic, on the one hand, and English, German, French, and so on, on the other, as members of different language families (Bergs and Brinton 2012; Algeo 2010; Crystal 2010: 302; Campbell 2006: 190-191; Crowley 1997: 22-25, 110-111; Pyles and Algeo 1993: 61-94). Therefore, he proposed the lexical root theory to account for the genetic relationships between Arabic and English, in particular, and all (Indo-)European languages in general for three main reasons: namely, (a) geographical continuity and/or proximity between their homelands, (b) persistent cultural interaction and similarity between their peoples over the ages, and, above all, (c) linguistic similarity between Arabic and such languages (see Jassem 2013b for further detail).

This is only the beginning part of the article. PLEASE CLICK HERE TO READ THE ARTICLE IN PRINTER-FRIENDLY VERSION.

Zaidan Ali Jassem
Department of English Language and Translation
Qassim University
P.O.Box 6611, Buraidah, KSA
zajassems@gmail.com
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