The Arabic Origins of English and Indo-European "Life and Death Terms": A Radical Linguistic Theory Approach

Abstract

This paper examines the Arabic origins and/or cognates of English, German, French,
Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit ''life and death'' and related terms from a radical linguistic (or lexical
root) theory perspective. The data consists of 100 such words like live, alive, life, vital, survive,
revive, die, mortal, fatal, sleep, nod, doze, dizzy, coma, conscious, awake, get up, hypnosis, kill,
murder, grave, tomb, cemetery, cremation, epitaph. The results show that while all such words
have true Arabic cognates, with the same or similar forms and meanings, their differences are
all found, however, to be due to natural and plausible causes and different routes of linguistic
change. For example, English live derives via Old English lifian and German leben from Arabic
lafi'a (alfa, alfa'a) 'to remain alive' or alabba 'remain, stay', turning /b/ into /f (v)/; vital comes
via French and Latin vita 'life' from Arabic 2iat 'life', changing /2/ into /v/; mortal derives via
Latin mors 'death' from Arabic mawt 'death' via /r/-insertion; fatal comes via French from Latin
fat(a/um) 'death' from Arabic faad 'death', turning /d/ into /t/. Therefore, the results indicate,
contrary to Comparative Method and Family Tree-model claims, that Arabic, English, and all
Indo-European languages belong to the same language, let alone the same family. In particular,
they show that English, German, French, and Latin are really Arabic dialects because Arabic
has all the cognates for English life, German leben, French and Latin vita, viva while all the
others have one each. Consequently, they prove the adequacy of the radical linguistic (or lexical
root) theory according to which Arabic, English, German, French, Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit
are dialects of the same language with Arabic being their origin all because of its phonetic
capacity and huge lexical variety and wealth; they further indicate that there is a radical
language from which all human languages stemmed and which has been preserved almost intact
in Arabic without which it is impossible to interpret such lexical richness.