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

Abstract

This paper investigates the Arabic cognates or origins of cognitive and
mental words in English, German, French, Latin, and Greek from a lexical root theory
perspective. The data consists of 100 terms or so like think, recollect, remember,
memorize, mind, mental, intellect, intelligent, cute, clever, cognition, assume, suppose,
know, comprehend, deduce, infer, inform, wit, wise, reason, justify, and so on. The
results demonstrate 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, French,
and Latin inform(ation) comes from Arabic ma3rifa(tun) 'knowledge' via reordering
and /3/-loss; English clever derives from Arabic filq 'clever, cleavage' via reordering,
changing /q/ to /k/, and /r/-insertion; English and German think/denken obtains from
Arabic fakkar, fikr (n) 'think' via reordering and turning /f/ into /th/; English know/ken
comes from Arabic aiqan 'know', turning /q/ into /k/. 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, huge lexical variety and
multiplicity