LANGUAGE IN INDIA

Strength for Today and Bright Hope for Tomorrow

Volume 13:6 June 2013
ISSN 1930-2940

Managing Editor: M. S. Thirumalai, Ph.D.
Editors: B. Mallikarjun, Ph.D.
         Sam Mohanlal, Ph.D.
         B. A. Sharada, Ph.D.
         A. R. Fatihi, Ph.D.
         Lakhan Gusain, Ph.D.
         Jennifer Marie Bayer, Ph.D.
         S. M. Ravichandran, Ph.D.
         G. Baskaran, Ph.D.
         L. Ramamoorthy, Ph.D.
Assistant Managing Editor: Swarna Thirumalai, M.A.

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The Arabic Origins of "Time Terms" in English and European Languages:
A Lexical Root Theory Approach

Zaidan Ali Jassem

Abstract

This paper examines the Arabic cognates and/or origins of time words in English, German, French, Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit from a lexical root theory viewpoint. The data consists of a little over 140 terms such as time, date, hour, day, night, morning, yesterday, now, month, year, annually, eventually, initially, finally, sometimes, often and so on. The results show that all such words have true Arabic cognates, with the same or similar forms and meanings. All their different forms, however, are shown to be due to natural and plausible causes of linguistic change. For example, English time, French temp, and Latin tempus derive from Arabic zaman 'time' through different processes such as turning /z/ into /t/ in all as opposed to merging /n/ into /m/ in English and dissimilating it into /p/ in the other two; English date and German Zeit 'time' come from Arabic waqt 'time' (gate, kate in Palestinian Arabic) via reordering and turning /q/ into /d/ in the former and /z (ts)/ in the latter. Contrary to Comparative Method claims, this entails that Arabic, English and all European languages belong to the same language, let alone the same family. Owing to their phonetic complexity, huge lexical variety and multiplicity, Arabic words are the original source from which the others stemmed. This proves the adequacy of the lexical root theory according to which Arabic, English, German, French, Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit are dialects of the same language with the first being the origin.

Keywords: Time words, Arabic, English, German, French, Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, historical linguistics, lexical root theory

1. Introduction

The lexical root theory has been proposed by Jassem (2012a-f, 2013a-h) to reject the classification of the comparative 'historical linguistics' method that Arabic belongs to a different language family than English, German, French, and all (Indo-)European languages in general (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). Instead, it firmly established in fifteen studies so far the inextricably close genetic relationship between Arabic and such languages on all levels: phonetically, morphologically, grammatically, and lexically or semantically (Jassem 2012a-f, 2013a-h).

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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