Some Contrarian Etymology

Off Topic

Often I see a word in English, Latin or other languages that is similar to words in Hebrew or Arabic. Since both are founded on even older languages, the notion that they weren't borrowed from the older languages is absurd. We don't know what languages were spoken everywhere throughout history, because not all languages were written down. But when you see words that have similar meanings across language families that have been connected in some way their entire history, it is entirely possible that the words were shared, even if the grammar and other history of the languages wasn't. People share words with other people. It's not accident that words like Genius and Jinn share a common sound. There are lots of similar words like that. Languages can converge by sharing vocabulary, or diverge by contact with other neighbors or isolation.

English as Pidgin

I also believe that many major languages started as pidgin languages spoken by people brought into commerce with one another. A "Synthetic" language is taught in schools (or by tutors) and serves the purposes of Governments and courts, but a pidgin language starts in markets as people try to understand one another. I believe that the Atlantic languages simplification of grammar reflects "pidgin" influences. In Britain, when Welsh, Angles, Saxons, Jutes and later Norse, Gaelic and French speakers, tried to do business with one another, their languages were so close they had to use short cuts to avoid misunderstanding each other. So they replaced complex Verb forms with simplified ones and used syntax and auxiliary words to convey parts of speech; past tense, future tense, intentionality, etc... Later, efforts to turn them into synthetic languages tried to freeze this dynamic pidgin as it was on the way to becoming English. English was also influenced by Welsh, Irish and other language speakers, who found it easier to use a pidgin than try to teach folks their own divergent languages. That is also why pidgins are so popular, and often similar, worldwide.

Recently I was reading a book on Mediterranean pirates and it devoted part of a Chapter to a language spoken by sailors on the Mediterranean. I believe he referred to it as "Ladino", which was strikingly like the Ladino my wife had studied as spoken by Sephardi Jews, but was a pidgin, not a form of Castilian Spanish.

Scholars like to develop hard and fast principles. I'll never forget a book on Wolves that differentiated wolves of different parts of the world by how they hold their tails. Anyone who has studied dogs or wolves knows that for those that have functional tails, how tails are held depends on mood, not race or subspecies. I suppose the scholars got all their information from somewhere. But that is why science lives by validation and experimentation. We all get it wrong many times before we get it right, at least on some subjects. Reality is messy and pure-breeds get genetic diseases. We can under-estimate risks, or over-estimate them. We can claim family resemblances where it is pure accident, or ignore family resemblances because of prejudices.