LANGUAGE IN INDIA

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Volume 13:5 May 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 "Speech and Writing Terms" in English and European Languages:
A Lexical Root Theory Approach

Zaidan Ali Jassem

Abstract

This paper investigates the Arabic cognates and/or origins of speech and writing terms in English, German, French, Latin, and Greek from a lexical root theory standpoint. The data consists of 357 terms such as language, speak, say, talk, mean, write, describe, scribe, read, study, teach, narrate, advise, agree, accent, sorry, letter, literature, list, lesson, lexis, religion, lecture, dialect, picture, graph, colloquial, yes, please, and so on. The results show that all such words have true Arabic cognates, with the same or similar forms and meanings. Their different forms, however, are shown to be due to natural and plausible causes of linguistic change. For example, English and French language and Latin lingua come from Arabic lisaan 'tongue' via reordering and turning /s/ into /g/; English speak/speech and German sprechen/Sprache 'speak' derive from Arabic Sakhab 'noise, talk' via different routes like reordering and turning /S & kh/ into /s & k/. This entails, contrary to traditional Comparative Method claims, that Arabic, English and all European languages belong to the same language rather than the same family. Due to their phonetic complexity, huge lexical variety and multiplicity, 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: Speech/writing terms, Arabic, English, German, French, Latin, Greek, historical linguistics, lexical root theory

1. Introduction

The lexical root theory has been proposed and used by Jassem (2012a-f, 2013a-g) to reject the claims of the comparative 'historical linguistics' method that Arabic, on the one hand, and English, German, French, and all (Indo-)European languages in general, on the other, belong to 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). Instead, it firmly established the inextricably close genetic relationship between Arabic and such languages on all levels: phonetically, morphologically, grammatically, and semantically or lexically (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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