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

Abstract

This paper sets out to examine the Arabic cognates or origins of wining and dining
words in English, German, French, Latin, and Greek from a lexical root theory perspective. The
data consists of 240 terms or so like ale, wine, vinegar, sherry, liquor, beer, whisky, beverage,
vodka, drink, butler, absorb, spew, food, salt, oil, milk, cheese, dairy, pepper, dine, eat,
aliment, digest, regurgitate, taste, crunch, munch, vomit, pie, tart, pasta, pizza, meat, bread,
and so on. The results manifest that all such words have true Arabic cognates, with the same or
similar forms and meanings. Their different forms, however, are all found to be due to natural
and plausible causes of linguistic change. For example, English, German, French, Greek and
Latin wine (Wein, vin(e), oinos) comes from Arabic wain 'wine', turning /w/ into /v/ in some;
English eat and German essen derives from Arabic 3asha 'eat' via /3/-loss and turning /sh/ into
/t (s)/; English, French, and Latin food is from Arabic fadaa' 'food'; English and German dine
derives from Arabic 'adam 'food, eating', replacing /m/ by /n/. As a consequence, the results
indicate, contrary to Comparative Method claims, that Arabic, English, and all (Indo-)European
languages belong to the same language, let alone the same family. They, therefore, prove 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 because of its
phonetic complexity and huge lexical variety and multiplicity.