scholarly journals THE ARABIC ORIGINS OF ENGLISH AND EUROPEAN "PLACE NAMES": A CONSONANTAL RADICAL THEORY APPROACH

2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 27
Author(s):  
Zaidan Ali Jassem
Keyword(s):  
Historical Linguistics ◽  
Genetic Relationships ◽  
Comparative Method ◽  
Theory Approach ◽  
Family Tree ◽  
Place Names ◽  
Tree Model ◽  
Radical Theory ◽  
Linguistic Change ◽  
European Languages

This paper examines the Arabic origins of some common place names in English, German, French, Latin, Greek, Russian, and Sanskrit from a consonantal radical or lexical root theory perspective. The data consists of the names of around 60 key cities like Birmingham, Brighton, Cambridge, Chester, Derby, Essex, Exeter, Glasgow, London, Manchester, Oxford, Queensville, York, etc. The results clearly show that all such names have true Arabic cognates, with the same or similar forms and meanings whose different forms, however, are all found to be due to natural and plausible causes and different courses of linguistic change. Furthermore, they show that place names play an important role in both near and distant genetic relationships. As a consequence, the results indicate, contrary to Comparative Method and Family-Tree Model claims (e.g. Campbell 2013; Harper 2012-18),� that Arabic, English, and all Indo-European languages� belong to the same language, let alone the same family. Therefore, they prove the adequacy of the consonantal radical theory in relating English, German, French, Latin, and Greek to Arabic as their origin all because, unlike any other language in the group, it shares cognates with all of them in addition to its huge linguistic repertoire phonetically, phonologically, morphologically, syntactically, and semantically.Keywords: Place names, Arabic, English, German, French, Russian, Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, historical linguistics, consonantal radical/lexical root theory

The Arabic Origins of English and Indo-European “Definite Articles”: A Radical Linguistic Theory Approach

2016 ◽  
Vol 4 (6) ◽  
pp. 26
Author(s):  
Zaidan Ali Jassem
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Method ◽  
Linguistic Theory ◽  
General Level ◽  
Theory Approach ◽  
Tree Model ◽  
Linguistic Change ◽  
European Languages ◽  
The Family ◽  
Different Types ◽  
Definite Articles

This paper traces the Arabic origins or cognates of the “definite articles” in English and Indo-European languages from a radical linguistic (or lexical root) theory perspective. The data comprises the definite articles in English, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Romanian, Latin, Greek, Macedonian, Russian, Polish, Sanskrit, Hindi, Bengali, Persian, and Arabic. The results clearly indicate that five different types of such articles emerged in the data, all of which have true Arabic cognates with the same or similar forms and meanings, whose differences are due to natural and plausible causes and different routes of linguistic change, especially lexical, semantic, or morphological shift. Therefore, the results support the adequacy of the radical linguistic theory according to which, unlike the Family Tree Model or Comparative Method, Arabic, English, German, French, Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit not only belong to the same language family, renamed Eurabian or Urban family, but also are dialects of the same language, with Arabic being their origin all because only it shares the whole cognates with them all and because it has a huge phonetic, morphological, grammatical, and lexical variety. They also manifest fundamental flaws and grave drawbacks which plague English and Indo-European lexicography for ignoring Arabic as an ultimate ancestor and progenitor not only in the treatment of the topic at hand but in all others in general. On a more general level, they also show that there is a radical language from which all human languages stemmed and which has been preserved almost intact in Arabic, thus being the most conservative and productive language

scholarly journals THE ARABIC COGNATES OR ORIGINS OF PLURAL MARKERS IN WORLD LANGUAGES: A RADICAL LINGUISTIC THEORY APPROACH

2017 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 144
Author(s):  
Zaidan Ali Jassem
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Method ◽  
Linguistic Theory ◽  
World Population ◽  
Theory Approach ◽  
World Language ◽  
Linguistic Features ◽  
Tree Model ◽  
Linguistic Change ◽  
World Languages

This paper traces the Arabic origins of "plural markers" in world languages from a radical linguistic (or lexical root) theory perspective. The data comprises the main plural markers like cats/oxen in 60 world languages from 14 major and minor families- viz., Indo-European, Sino-Tibetan, Afro-Asiatic, Austronesian, Dravidian, Turkic, Mayan, Altaic (Japonic), Niger-Congo, Bantu, Uto-Aztec, Tai-Kadai, Uralic, and Basque, which constitute 60% of world languages and whose speakers make up 96% of world population. The results clearly show that plural markers, which are limited to a few markers in all languages comprised of �s/-as/-at, -en, -im, -a/-e/-i/-o/-u, and �, have true Arabic cognates with the same or similar forms and meanings, whose differences are due to natural and plausible causes and different routes of linguistic change. Therefore, the results reject the traditional classification of the Comparative Method and/or Family Tree Model of such languages into separate, unrelated families, supporting instead the adequacy of the radical linguistic theory according to which all world languages are related to one another, which eventually stemmed from a radical or root language which has been preserved almost intact in Arabic as the most conservative and productive language. In fact, Arabic can be safely said to be the radical language itself for, besides other linguistic features, sharing the plural cognates in this case with all the other languages alone.Keywords: Plurality, language families and relationships, radical world language, radical linguistic theory

scholarly journals The Arabic Origins of "Basque and Finnish Pronouns": A Radical Linguistic Theory Approach

2014 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 109-120
Author(s):  
Zaidan Ali Jassem
Keyword(s):  
Old English ◽  
Comparative Method ◽  
Linguistic Theory ◽  
Theory Approach ◽  
World Language ◽  
Linguistic Change ◽  
European Languages ◽  
Demonstrative Pronouns ◽  
Third Person ◽  
Arabic And English

This paper investigates the Arabic origins of Basque and Finnish pronouns mainly and Basque verbs to be/have secondarily from a Radical Linguistic Theory perspective, a slightly revised version of Lexical Root Theory. The data consists of personal and demonstrative pronouns in Finnish and Basque in the main and verbs to be/have in the latter. The results show that Finnish and Basque pronouns have true Arabic cognates, with the same or similar forms and meanings. Their formal differences, however, result from natural and plausible causes and different courses of linguistic change. For example, Basque ni 'I', Finnish mina/mä ‘I', and Arabic ana (ani, inni) 'I' are identical cognates, in the second of which /m/ split from /n/; Finnish sina/Te'you' come from Arabic anta/-ta 'you' via reversal and turning /t/ into /s/; similarly, Basque zu 'you' is derived from Arabic -ta/-ka (iaka) 'you (nom./acc.) where /k/ became /z/, which compares very easily with Old English ge 'you' and German Sie 'you'; Finnish reflexive itse 'self' is from Arabic dhaat(i) 'myself' via reordering and replacing /dh/ by /s/. Third person pronouns in both languages are originally demonstrative pronouns, which is similar to what happens in English and Indo-European languages and Chinese as well, all of which come from Arabic dha/ti 'this'. Similarly, all Basque verbs to be/havehave true and identical Arabic (and English, German, Latin) cognates. As a consequence, the results indicate, contrary to Comparative Method claims, that Arabic, Basque and Finnish are genetically related, leading to the postulation of a single, perfect, sudden world language, which may be called Radical or Root Language, from which all human languages descended. The Radical Language could not have died out at all but has instead survived into modern languages, having been preserved almost intact in Arabic. They, therefore, prove the adequacy of the radical linguistic or lexical root theory according to which Arabic, Basque, and Finnish are genetically related besides English, German, French, Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, and Mandarin Chinese which have already been found to be dialects of the same language with Arabic being their origin all because of its phonetic capacity or complexity, huge lexical variety and multiplicity, and linguistic permanence or sustainability.

scholarly journals Phylogenetic and areal models of Indo-European relatedness: The role of contact in reconstruction

2013 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 379-410 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bridget Drinka
Keyword(s):  
Crucial Role ◽  
Family Tree ◽  
External Influence ◽  
Tree Model ◽  
Considerable Evidence ◽  
European Languages ◽  
The Family ◽  
Linguistic Innovation ◽  
European Family

The Indo-European family has traditionally been viewed as a textbook example of genetically related languages, easily fit onto a family tree model. What is less often recognized, however, is that IE also provides considerable evidence for the operation of contact among these related languages, discernable in the layers of innovation that certain varieties share. In this paper, I claim that the family tree model as it is usually depicted, discretely divided and unaffected by external influence, may be a useful representation of language relatedness, but is inadequate as a model of change, especially in its inability to represent the crucial role of contact in linguistic innovation. The recognition of contact among Indo-European languages has implications not only for the geographical positioning of IE languages on the map of Eurasia, but also for general theoretical characterizations of change: the horizontal, areal nature of change implies a stratification of data, a layered distribution of archaic and innovative features, which can help us grasp where contact, and innovation, has or has not occurred.

scholarly journals Variation in Onko Dialect of Yoruba

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (13) ◽  
pp. 64-82
Author(s):  
Gbenga Fakuade ◽  
◽  
Lawal Tope Aminat ◽  
Adewale Rafiu ◽  
◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Language Contact ◽  
Comparative Method ◽  
Descriptive Statistics ◽  
Family Tree ◽  
Tree Model ◽  
Theoretical Tool ◽  
The Family

This paper examined variation in Onko dialect using the family tree model and the corresponding comparative method as the theoretical tool. A wordlist of basic items and a designed frame technique were used to gather data for this study. The data were presented in tables and the analyses were done through descriptive statistics. The data were analyzed to determine variation at the phonological, syntactic and lexical levels. The study revealed differences between Standard Yoruba and Onko dialect as well as the variation therein. Two basic factors discovered to be responsible for variations in Onko are geography (distribution of Onko communities) and language contact. The paper established that Onko exhibits variations, which are however not significant enough to disrupt mutual intelligibility among the speakers, and thus all the varieties remain a single dialect.

Let's talk about trees: Genetic relationships of languages and their phylogenetic representation

2019 ◽  
Vol 50 (3) ◽  
pp. 450-457
Author(s):  
Robert Blust
Keyword(s):  
International Symposium ◽  
Historical Linguistics ◽  
Genetic Relationships ◽  
Academic Disciplines ◽  
National Museum ◽  
Language Family ◽  
Tree Model ◽  
Pros And Cons ◽  
Stated Purpose

This volume contains an introduction and eight papers presented at an international symposium ‘Let's Talk about Trees’, which was organised by Ritsuko Kikusawa and hosted by the National Museum of Ethnology of Osaka, Japan, in February 2013. The stated purpose of the meeting was to evaluate the pros and cons of the classic tree model of historical linguistics in describing the order of splits within a language family. Because the problem of modelling relationships of descent is common to other disciplines, contributors were invited from a range of academic disciplines, including not only linguistics, but also what is described on page one as ‘cladistics’, ‘biology’ and ‘genetics’, although cladistics is clearly a part of biological taxonomy, and not an independent discipline.

Linguistic history and historical linguistics

2018 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 106-127
Author(s):  
George van Driem
Keyword(s):  
Historical Linguistics ◽  
Family Tree ◽  
Language Family ◽  
Tree Model ◽  
Linguistic History ◽  
History Of Linguistics ◽  
History Of

Abstract This invited response to a piece by LaPolla, published in issue 39/2 of LTBA, addresses both LaPolla’s misrepresentations of the history of linguistics and his flawed understanding of historical linguistics. The history of linguistic thought with regard to the Tibeto-Burman or Trans-Himalayan language family vs. the Indo-Chinese or “Sino-Tibetan” family tree model is elucidated and juxtaposed against the remarkable robustness of certain ahistorical myths and the persistence of unscientific argumentation by vocal proponents of the Sino-Tibetanist paradigm, such as LaPolla.

Historical Linguistics: Classification

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Constanze Weise
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Data Acquisition ◽  
Historical Linguistics ◽  
Comparative Method ◽  
Family Tree ◽  
Language Family ◽  
Record Keeping ◽  
African Languages ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Family

Many societies in pre-1800 Africa depended on orality both for communication and for record keeping. Historians of Africa, among other ways of dealing with this issue, treat languages as archives and apply what is sometimes called the “words and things” approach. Every language is an archive, in the sense that its words and their meanings have histories. The presence and use of particular words in the vocabulary of the language can often be traced back many centuries into the past. They are, in other words, historical artifacts. Their presence in the language in the past and their meanings in those earlier times tell us about the things that people knew, made use of, and talked about in past ages. They provide us complex insights into the world in which people of past societies lived and operated. But in order to reconstruct word histories, historians first need to determine the relationships and evolution of the languages that possessed those words. The techniques of comparative historical linguistics and language classification allow one to establish a linguistic stratigraphy: to show how the periods can be established in which meaning changes in existing words or changes in the words used for particular meanings took place, to assess what these word histories reveal about changes in a society and its culture, and to identify whether internal innovation or encounters with other societies mediated such changes. The comparative method on its own cannot establish absolute dates of language divergence. The method does allow scholars, however, to reconstruct the lexicons of material culture used at each earlier period in the language family tree. These data identify the particular cultural features to look for in the archaeology of people who spoke languages of the family in earlier times, and that evidence in turn enables scholars to propose datable archaeological correlations for the nodes of the family tree. A second approach to dating a language family tree has been a lexicostatistical technique, often called glottochronology, which seeks to estimate how long ago sister languages began to diverge out of their common ancestor language by using calculations based on the proportion of words in the most basic parts of the vocabulary that the languages still retain in common. Recent work in computational linguistic phylogenetics makes use of elements of lexicostatistics, and there have been efforts to automate the comparative method as well. In order to compare languages historically, two important issues first have to be confronted, namely data acquisition and data analysis. Linguistic field collection of vocabularies from native speakers and linguistic archive work, especially with dictionaries, are principal means of data acquisition. The comparative historical linguistic approach and methods provide the tools for analyzing these linguistic data, both diachronically and synchronically. Nearly all African languages have been classified into four language families, namely: Niger-Congo, Nilo-Saharan, Afroasiatic, and Khoisan. The Malagasy language of Madagascar is an exception, in that it was brought west across the Indian Ocean to that island from the East Indies early in the first millennium ce. Malagasy as well as several languages with an Indo-European origin, such as Afrikaans, Krio, and Nigerian Pidgin English, are not part of this discussion.

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