• Zaidan Ali Jassem

  Author

This paper investigates the Arabic cognates and/or origins of family terms
in English, German, French, Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit from a lexical root theory
viewpoint. The data consists of 107 terms or so such as mother, father, brother, sister,
son, daughter, relative, wife, husband, couple, marriage, affiliation, friendship, 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 all shown to be
due to natural and plausible causes of linguistic change. For example, English
mother, German Mutter, French mere, and Latin matra derive from Arabic mar'a(t)
'woman, wife' via lexical shift, reordering, and turning /t/ into /th (Ø)/; English son
and German Sohn 'son' come from Arabic Sinu 'son, brother, uncle' via narrowing and
turning /S/ into /s/. As a result, this entails, contrary to Comparative Method claims,
that Arabic, English and all (Indo-)European languages belong to the same language,
let alone the same family. Because of their phonetic complexity, huge lexical variety
and multiplicity, Arabic words are the original source from which English and all 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.

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