5/25/2007

What I learned today

Filed under: — Aprille @ 1:19 pm

Actually I learned more than average today, and it’s only 1:04.

Anyway, here’s something I learned that I thought was really interesting. I’m reading a book called The Unfolding of Language: An Evolutionary Tour of Mankind’s Greatest Invention by Guy Deutscher. In it, I learned this interesting fact.

All the languages I (and presumably you, gentle reader) am familiar with use prefixes, suffixes, and additional marker words to indicate things like tense, person, gender, and plurality:

I say
She says

Yo digo
Ella dice

I/you/she will say
Ella dirá

Arabic, however, takes a different approach. Rather than add extra words or tack letters on the beginning or ends of words to denote these changes, Arabic relies on a base set of three consonants that represent a concept, and then vowels are inserted between and around the consonants to make the word take different forms. And not just tenses and gender, no! They can mean widely varied things based on the vowel combinations, but they still take root in the three-consonant set.

For example…the words Islam, Muslim, Solomon, and Salaam are all, at their core, the same word (s-l-m, in that order). s-l-m is never pronounced by itself, but it means “be at peace.” i-a, [m]u-i, o-o-o, and a-a-a, respectively, are what give the words their nuances. They have evolved in meaning throughout the centuries, but the etymology of each relates to “be at peace.”

Fascinating!

3 responses to “What I learned today”

  1. jack says:

    Interesting stuff!

    I ran across another odd factoid on Arabic in a Wikipedia article on E-Prime, a version of English stripped of all forms of the verb “to be”. Proponents believe that E-Prime writing communicates more clearly, eliminates many categories of misunderstandings, and so on.

    The article notes that Arabic, as well as Russian, already lack a present-tense “to be”. The idea intriguing, as Arabic or Russian speakers would apparently say.

  2. Katie says:

    Hebrew works the same way as Arabic…three-consonant base concepts, with vowels inserted (only in the speaking, not in the text) to clarify tense, number, etc.

  3. Anton Cobern says:

    Thank you, that wasvery interesting. I was born in Russia in 1980 but my parents fled and came here in England. Honestly, I didnt really care much about my russian past until my mum died last month, now I’ve been trying to find out as much as I possibly can. Seemed like cuisine was as good a place as any to start from! You dont generally hear much about russian cuisine do you? Anyway, I found a a good russian recipe site here that other readers might be interested in .

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