HEBREW LANGUAGE AND CULTURE REVEALS THE IGBO HEBREW HERITAGE( OR VICE VERSA) THIS ISNT A SIMPLE MATCHING OF WORDS PLEASE READ THE MESSAGE BELOW BEFORE READING THE TWO PAGE EXCERPT. Merritt took pains to demonstrate that the study of the evolution of languages is the study of cognates, “a word that derives from Latin cognates ‘born together’. Thus cognates are those words that derive from a single earlier word in a single earlier language, a word that has diversified into similar (or even dissimilar) forms in contemporary languages”. The science of classifications is called taxonomy and in linguistics it belongs to the terrain of Ethno-Semantics. Ethno-Semantics uses similarities of sound and meaning shared by words from diverse linguistic and geographical environments to explain “convergence, borrowing and common origin”. Merritt explains that “the arbitrary nature of the sound/meaning relationship in language guarantees that neither the environment, nor human psychology, nor anything else, other than common descent, can motivate the matching of certain words with certain meanings in different languages”, and that “the laws of probability” militate against accidental convergence (p. 12), while borrowing is a sign of sustained historical and cultural contact. Therefore one can comfortably assert that the path of languages is the path of human civilizations. One must be used to chart the other. As a matter of fact, considering the fact that human beings cannot always be trusted to not bend the truth in favour of themselves and their nation, considering the fact that human written records have always tended to over-glorify the authors, sometimes even turning the truth on its head, language is a History. On the Origin of Languages: Studies in Linguistic Taxonomy By Merritt Ruhlen The Origin of Language: Tracing the Evolution of the Mother Tongue By Meritt Ruhlen Cow Without Tail, Book 1 By Godwin Boswell Akubue
Posted on: Tue, 06 Jan 2015 05:44:34 +0000
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