The Most ABSURD Linguistics Theories (#1)

hey guys so I'm finally done with finals done with IB done with all that shizzel Mac to everyone else that just finished IB and finals in general congrats no matter how you do you still made it and it's time to just chill cuz it gets crazy what I'm bringing to you guys today is a new series where I pretty much want to talk about Linguistics research and more broadly the creation and dissemination of knowledge in general it'll probably usually have a focus on Linguistics but also expect videos on the current state of Academia in general since it's something I've been obsessed with investigating as of late this video specifically is going to talk about a paper called the Arabic origins of English pronouns a lexical root Theory approach by ziden Ali jum um an example of just awful Linguistics research while also explaining why it's bad which I think is a really important step since the idea isn't just a point and laugh it's to actually learn something and hopefully help correct faulty knowledge and overall make sure we're advancing in the right direction I was originally going to talk about three examples but I realized I wanted to go really in- depth into these to make sure I'm fulfilling that goal all this means is that you'll be able to expect videos that are more in-depth though remember this is just a series so I'll also be putting out shorter videos on the side I'm also using this video to experiment with some new things first of all added video chapters which means you can just scroll through different parts of the video and second of all if you could tell I don't have music for this video since people either loved it or hated it kind of know in between so maybe in the future I'll just have soft Ambient sound instead like waves or nature or fire something like that maybe lowii but for now I'll just leave the music out and see how it goes anyway let's get to business Jim's argument is simple he uses lexical root Theory to claim that all personal per pronouns in English and by extension German French and Latin ultimately come from Arabic and that we've misclassified those languages as being part of different language families lexical root theory is a System jasm created to examine the genetic relationship between languages in his own words it is so calleded because it is based on the lexical root of the word the paper starts off pretty good he defines cognates which are related words like book and B in German and then discusses the swadesh list which although not uncontroversial can be a way of comparing languages when looking for genetic similarity by translating a list of words in both languages and comparing them but then he begins his argument which is where things get a little weird immediately we're hit with an interesting reference indeed this is the first of nine other times he references his past work within a 20page paper in this case citing how he contested the idea that English and Arabic belong to different language families fair enough though I guess I mean let's hear him out jessum then presents the personal pronouns of the languages he's working with I've rearranged the ones for Modern English and Arabic for clarity since those are the most relevant to the topic this part of the video is time stamped for quick access if you want to go back and look at them again at any time immediately we have a problem though jum never specifies what variety of Arabic we're talking about for example in Moran the first person singular prefix is not but rather n as in I need to go cut my nails based on his tables however I was thinking we can at least assume he speaks a modern variety of Arabic seeing as he makes no mention of any dual forms which would have been present if he was talking about classical Arabic for example if this is true this would immediately invalidate probably every claim in this paper since he'd be implying that Latin pronouns a language spoken many thousands of years ago came from an Arabic variety spoken today further implying Arabic speakers are Time Travelers but I digress since I don't really know for sure so let's keep reading the paper this is rather small but I also noticed he romaniz the voiceless frel fortive ha as the number who if you didn't know when writing Arabic in the Latin alphabet we almost always use numbers to represent some of the sounds that are kind of weird to spell in Latin like the voice FR frive which is written with a three the voiceless counterpart is much more predominant written with the number seven since the number two is often used for the glottal stop as an and I have a question in a piece of text where you're trying to teach something I feel like you should try to use the more widely used version to make sure you're understood and get some of those descriptivism points anyway he then describes the steps of lexal root Theory first he reduces words to their Roots the examples he provides being fifthly becoming five and uniqueness becoming one fair enough though another small thing I'd argue that the root of uniqueness is actually unique since although unique ultimately does come from the Latin word for one which is unus we're talking about the language right now at this point of lexical root Theory so I don't know step two is the phonetic analysis probably the most important part of the system he explains reasonably accurately that basically any sound can become a totally unrelated sound over time he uses this to claim how the last Dental FR of th in Arabic th meaning three split into three sounds in English T D and S as in the words Trio third and thice I'll talk about this more later but although he has a third step phonetic analysis really is his main tool like I said his third step he claims to use is morphological and semantic analysis though in the same paragraph he says that because morphological and semantic analysis do not influence the meaning of the lexical root they are not critical at this stage and can be ignored therefore so you know whatever he also claims that lexical root Theory can in consequence also explain the Arabic origins of All European languages which is a problem since it's not clear what he means by European language does this also include uralic languages like Finnish what about Basque anyway now that we know how jessum is looking at these words let's take a look at some of his examples which he prefaces with all English pronouns have direct true and real Arabic cognates as follows if there's one thing I love about him it's his confidence cuz godamn but anyway his sixth example tells us that the English first person plural possessive pronoun our comes from the Arabic suffixed na as in shuna they saw us where na became n then AR than our first of all n to isn't impossible but it's not extremely common but more importantly he never really explained what reversal meant consonants can definitely switch around which is why we say crocodile with the r at the beginning while the word in Spanish is codo with the r at the end but it's not really clear what he means especially in a longer string of sounds in the section talking about lexical root Theory at the beginning he claims that halleluya for example is a reversed and reduced form of the Islamic shahada which reads let that sink in I mean I don't know it just seems extremely unlikely for a language speaker to somehow pronounce an entire phrase backward and have that be spread to other speakers also I don't know what's up with this random how but it's pretty funny the rest of the paper pretty much continues with more of these examples and then concludes with one of the most absurd sentences I've probably ever heard in my life the percentage of shared pronouns between Arabic and English is 100% which according to C's classification which is in relation to the swades list means that they belong to or are dialects of the same language according to Z and jasam English and Arabic are dialects of the same language I mean let that sink in bro first of all he's going back on his words in the paragraph about the swades list he also explains that based on the percentage of shared words between two languages we can determine how long ago they split and whether or not they should be considered dialects or entirely separate languages thing is he also said this sort of classification has been severely attacked on various grounds which lie beyond the scope of this work in my opinion concluding by mentioning that 100% statistic is much more than enough to Warrant a discussion of whether or not that number can actually be used to make legitimate conclusions or if it can be trusted at all second of all a 100% similarity rate according to the percentage groups he mentions would imply that English and Arabic became different languages less than 500 years ago which is very obviously not true in the slightest I mean just look at Shakespeare and compare that to the writings of Ahmed IB fadlan for example I mean bro you'll hardly even find Lone words I just don't understand the biggest problem with the sound changes Justin proposes from Arabic to English is that that they all just feel like huge reaches and mainly they're irregular for context let's now look at the comparative method the more accepted way of assessing the relationship between languages a main idea of the comparative method among other things that will be discussed later is to find systematic patterns of sound changes between languages this isn't just creating random sound changes between individual words but rather looking at the entire language and finding rigorous patterns a really famous example is with the p and f sounds and Germanic and romance languages let's look at the word for father in some of those languages Germanic languages like English Icelandic and German tend to have an F sound as in Father father F in the romance languages though the F in Father tends to actually be a p instead as in French Spanish and indeed in Latin what's important about these sound changes is that they are predictable in many cases an initial F sound in a dramatic language will correspond to a p sound in the equivalent word in the romance language this doesn't mean in all cases but it is still a pattern that can be observed across a large amount of words fish f fish fish and the romance language is this is also why more fancy fish related words like pescatarian in English start with a P we borrow them from Latin again these sound changes are predictable which leads to pretty strong evidence that they are groups of related languages all the dramatic ones have F while all the romance ones have P another great example is with maudi and Hawaiian which are Polynesian languages you don't have to do guesswork with these languages in almost all cases if you apply a certain set of sound changes to and from you will end up with the equivalent word in the other language let's look at some of the correspondences in Mai you have ra while in hawaian you usually have La in Mai T is usually which can also be pronounced and Mai is usually a glal stop in Hawaiian which is a so in Mai for example we have the word ariki which is a type of Chief and if we change the sounds to match the ones Hawaiian has we get Ali which is the same word in Hawaiian it's correct that's how it is and we can do this backward too if we take Hawaiian Oro which means language and apply the changes we get the correct form in Mai Cordo again these are predictable sound changes in these languages here's some more examples k i what Zen JM is doing is looking at individual words instead and fantasizing about how they might have evolved rather than looking at Cross language patterns let's try to look at words that start with f in English and find their Arabic counterparts to see if we have this sort of similarity given he claims these are dialects that split less than 500 years ago we should absolutely see at least some similarities so let's find out for comparison I also have Dutch and Spanish off to the side father EB fish sea Floria fresh finger is very clearly I'm sorry but there's just no chance besides to confirm a genetic relationship we need to do much more than look at sounds we also need to consider other fields like morphosyntax or grammar for example Germanic languages tend to have a way of expressing possession on the noun while romance languages usually don't these groups of languages share some features which is why we might consider them to be a part of different families they of course won't share all features but definitely a large portion of them and similar structures are often pretty good indicators of genetic similarity in this regard Arabic might honestly be the most different language in terms of its grammar to English you could get I'd love to make a full video on the way Arabic makes words cuz it's absolutely fascinating but let's just say it looks nothing like how we do it again these languages are just completely different and while it may hypothetically be possible for these changes to happen over thousands and thousands of years it's exactly that it's a extremely unlikely and dare I say impossible for this to have happen in less than 500 years as he claimed another really important factor is to look at other fields like history and archaeology to analyze migration and language contact among other things which JM has completely ignored essentially you have to really stretch the link Arabic to English via sound changes and jessum does them all on an individual basis while truthfully related languages have systematic and predictable patterns across large parts of the language that we can analyze anyone with enough knowledge of common processes of phonetic Evolution can claim how one word comes from another though this won't always be right I can literally make up right now that the I word for fire which is AE comes from mask Su via this change su su ho a and then go along explaining labialization dealkalization and loss vow Harmony and making myself sound super fancy but in doing so I've ignored history geography archaeology genealogy language grammar culture Etc lexical root theory is just unfortunately inadequate it's just not enough additionally coincidences happen all the time one of the Japanese second person singular pronouns anata happens to sound a lot like the Arabic second person singular pronoun enta but this doesn't immediately mean that Japanese must evidently come from Arabic and is a dialect of it there's only so many sounds we can make with our mouths and we're bound to have coincidences at some point a lot of us also know of that Australian language maam where the word for dog is literally dog we know this is a coincidence but Jess would probably start claiming that that language is therefore a dialect of English and by extension a dialect of Arabic but you know we're not we're not doing that and by the way before we end how in God's green earth did this paper land in the international Journal of linguistics what because this is peer reviewed right so I did some digging and oh a little sketchy and like I'm sure they've published good things in the past but I guess this makes sense got to get that money I also looked through jums academia.edu bio and bro this guy has a PHD and he teaches so what must them kids be learning bro it's a little tragic but you know in conclusion what a guy and what a paper this video is not necessarily saying he's wrong it's more that everything he proposes just seems incredibly unlikely and unrealistic lexical root Theory just reaches too much and the evidence against it is extremely significant again though the point of this video is not to attack jessum because we need multiple perspectives to advance scientific knowledge in any field actually I'm thankful that he put his ideas out there because advancing knowledge also means assessing the value of other perspectives so criticizing work in all cases helps contribute to the propagation of knowledge it's why we try to do peer review for example but yeah hope you enjoyed watching and I might have some short pedagogical videos coming up soon so stay tuned for that I want to keep experimenting with different types of videos and topics so you could even expect some con linking stuff in the future as always I read all of your comments so feel free to leave your thoughts or critiques down below since that's what this is all about have a great day or night wherever you are and see you soon bye-bye

Channel: Sundro

Views: 24,886

Keywords: linguistic, language

Id: d-yN12BC8U0

Length: 13min 59sec (839 seconds)

Published: Thu May 23 2024