Re: Universal Roots

Richard writes:

> > Originally I came up with three stems: mother, father, and god.
> > Someone recently mentioned that there was no 'father' in Hebrew.
>
> No, I said that the root 'father' does not occur in Biblical

Hebrew.

> Hebrew does indeed have a word for father, '?a:v', cognate with
> Arabic 'abu' and Aramaic 'abba:', whence the English word 'abbot'.
> (American public schools don't teach religion, either, do they?
> Otherwise, you might have recalled the story of Abraham's name

being

> changed from Abram.) The point is that these words do not derive
> from the 'father' root, for so far as I am aware, no-one is

claiming

> that PIE *p corresponds to Proto-Semitic *b. Independent baby talk
> may be the origin, though 'father' has been analysed as
> meaning 'protector'.

Hmmm. Again we are having a problem with morphology vs. meaning.
The separation of church and state certainly has raised a rukus with
word etymologies for Americans.

> I thing 'morphology' and compounding should be allowed, though I

may

> regret this when the root erodes almost completely, leaving only

the

> affixes. If we go back to the issue of mutual comprehensibilty,
> broad meaning ought to be included, though I was allowing for it

not

> to be included. For example, Welsh for father is 'tad', which is
> totally unrelated to the English 'father'. However, I did not put
> Welsh forward as a counter-example, because I suspected it may have
> some derivatives of Latin pater 'father' analogous to
> English 'paternal'. (I don't have a Welsh dictionary at my

disposal.)

I think you know my opinion -- the entire study of universal roots
can show similarity amongst languages as well as language differences.
I'll repeat this once more for the folks in the Peanut Gallery --
before Marx and Darwin arrived on the scene, nineteenth century
scientists were able to meld both the thesis and antithesis into a
workable synthesis. Thus, art and science walked hand in hand. Marx
came along and stood Hegel on his head and simplified philisophical
discourse. This in turn caused a wedge to be driven between art and
science resulting in scientists today being so super reductionist
that one hand has no idea what the other one is doing.

> From your suggested words' including 'god', I can only assume you
> meant meanings rather than roots. The word for 'god' shows a good
> deal of variation in European languages; one scholar once named the
> European IE families by their word for 'god'! However, I doubt

that

> it's a universal concept. It doesn't appear on the Swadesh 100- or
> 200-word lists.

Possibly one reason the word 'god' doesn't appear on the Swadesh word
lists is because of social and political reasons i.e. scientists
today consider themselves atheists and anyone who is a non-atheist is
automatically given the label "creationist". Creationists are
automatically pooh-poohed as non-scientists. Do you by chance have
access to a World language list that "might" include meanings for the
term "god"?

Gerry