• Zaidan Ali Jassem

  Author

This paper investigates the Arabic origins of Chinese pronouns from a radical
linguistic theory standpoint, a slightly revised version of lexical root theory. The data consists of
personal, genitive, and demonstrative pronouns in Mandarin Chinese in the main and traditional
and modern Chinese dialects secondarily. The results show that Mandarin Chinese is perhaps
the simplest language in the world structurally speaking; all whose 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,
spoken Mandarin an 'I' and all similar n-based forms in historical and modern Chinese dialects
descend directly from Arabic ana 'I'; wŏ/wu 'I' come from Arabic 'iai and/or 'ee 'me/my' via /' &
ai/-mutation into /w & o/; ta 'he, she, it; that' is derived from Arabic ti (tihi) 'this (f)' via lexical
shift; de 'of, whose' is from Arabic dhi 'of, whose' where /dh/ became /d/. As a consequence, the
results indicate, contrary to Comparative Method claims, that Arabic and (Mandarin) Chinese
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 and Mandarin Chinese are
genetically related besides English, German, French, Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit 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 and huge lexical variety and multiplicity.

• pdf