Dear Michael and friends,

I'll take the bait, not because I have any great scholarly
input, but because I think the discussion is interesting.

I think it is tempting to assume that a sacred language
(particularly the language of your own faith) is the root
language. Certainly, I had believed that Aramaic was the common
ancestor of all Indo-European languages, until I became
skeptical after learning that it was the language most likely
spoken by Jesus. There is a vibrant community discussing Edenic
(none other than the language spoken in the Garden of Eden, from
which Hebrew derives). Many would have us believe that Sanskrit,
Arabic, or even English is the single language from which all
modern day languages derive.

However, perhaps the point you are making (or at least allowing
to be implied) is that there is an intrinsic meaning in basic
sounds (onomatopoeia) regardless of your mother tongue, even if
you were fortunate enough to be raised by wolves.

Onomatopoeia: word that imitates the sound it represents.
Examples: splash, buzz, hiss, wow, gush, kerplunk, click, pop,
katydid

I am not familiar with a single language in which 'mother' is
not some very obvious derivative of 'MA' and where 'father' is
not similar to 'DA', 'BA' or 'PA'. In fact, 'water', is often
something like 'WA' or 'VA'. It seems to me that one could find
commonalities between most/all languages, in fact, I believe
that families and groups are defined more or less on the basis
of these similarities. Certainly, no language is an
unconditioned phenomena.


If one assumes that:
(1) there is some primal language P
(2) that all languages derive and diverge from P
then
(3) For all languages, A, B
(4) there should (on average) be more commonality between A-P
and B-P than between A-B.

For example, suppose we took English, Chinese, and Pali. I
believe that we could safely say that there is more commonality
between English and Pali than between English and Chinese. But
can we say that there is a similar commonality between Pali and
Chinese?

I'd like to think so, but then again, I do have my bias.

Cheers,
Alex


---// Michael Olds said: //---

Briefly I hold that of the words
available to him at the time Gotama
chose those words whose roots went
back to the origins of language.
He did this because of the nature
of those early words as being built
on onomatopoea, animal sounds and
primitive situations and activities
(sex, eating, bodily functions,
hunting, farming). These words were
chosen because they have greater
universality and timelessness than
the other later words available at
the time.

---// :was said by Michael Olds //---




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