• Zaidan Ali Jassem

  Author

This paper examines the Arabic origins or cognates of celestial (sky) and terrestrial (earth) terms in English, German, French, Latin, and Greek, using a lexical root theory approach. The data consists of about 60 celestial and 120 terrestrial words. The results show that all such words in Arabic and English, for example, are true cognates with the same or similar forms and meanings, which means they belong not only to the same family but also to the same language, contrary to traditional comparative historical linguistics method claims. The different forms amongst such words are shown to be due to natural and plausible causes of phonetic, morphological and semantic change. For example, Latin and Greek terra, French terre, English earth, and German Erde, and Arabic arD (also thara) 'earth (dust)' are identical cognates via reversal and turning /D or th/ into /t or d/. Similarly, English acme, summit 'top' come from Arabic qimma(t) 'top' where /q/ became /k (s)/. Owing to their huge lexical variety and multiplicity besides phonetic complexity, 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.

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