However, the evolution of breath sounds did not end with the meaning of way or direction. Gradually, the sound ga became associated with those who lead the way, with those who go ahead and therefore know where to go. The leading becomes the knowing. Next comes a reinterpretation of protoroot the basis remains the same, but the pronunciation from the sounds kh and g becomes closer to the consonant k. And there are new diverse meanings of this sound: leading, knowing, main, smart, thinking. Although these meanings may seem varied at first glance, they all indicate the ability to think. So, the name of the Chinese game Go combines several meanings of this sound. At first I was surprised at the speculative nature of my conclusions, but than I immersed in this speculation more, that I understood my rightness again and again.
What words were formed with protoroot ka in its various shades? First of all, they touched the head, which is not only to wear a hat (by the way, this is also reflected in the words). For example, kapusta (cabbage)in Russian it means empty head, kaun (melon), kachan (head of cabbage), kalgan (head), kapa (kind of hat), kapyushon (hood), kepka (cap) and others. The words khalif (the khalif), kagan (a title of imperial rank in the Turkic and Mongolic languages), kasta (caste) and the Capitol have the same protoroot. In Sanskrit, the ancient language of India, you can find the same root word kapata, which has the meaning trick, deception, but comes from the same meaning: the ability to think. And in the maloyanisol dialect of my ancestors has a word gaka, which means big brother. How could such word appear? I think that this is the first-born, going ahead. And there are a lot of such interesting phenomena in the language.
There is another meaning derived from the sounds of breathing the Greek word ego (εγώ), which translates as I. In the older maloyanisol dialect, the word I sounds simpler go. Moreover, my grandmother did not pronounce a solid go, but again mixed sounds g and kh, closer to kho. The e sound in the Greek word ego is the sound of belonging. Literally, it means this is me. If we compare the Greek ego and the Russian word ekho (echo), it will be clear that it is the same. The echo is a returning sound of my voice, this is me.
All the basic sounds and protoroots associated with human physiology and its primary needs. You dont have to go far just remember your basic needs. What is the most important thing for a person? It needs air to breathe, it needs food to keep from starving, and it needs water. In addition, he\she needs to continue the family line, needs security, a roof over head, and other needs that are reflected in the language. Therefore, it is objective that besides the sounds of breathing, the first roles in the meaning-making had the sounds of food.
Man is a mammalian creature, breastfed. This is why, from infancy, from unconscious memory, we reproduce this deep key sound of the compressed lips m and the following sound of the opening lipsma. In almost all languages the word mama (mother) includes this ancient, imbibed with mothers milk, protoroot. But with feeding, the child uses not only the lips but also the tongue. The tongue presses the nipple of the breast to the palate, and the milk falls on the taste buds of the childs tongue under pressure. What sound is formed when the tongue pressed to the roof of the mouth? It is a sound n. In some languages this sound forms the word nana with the meaning mother. Nurses are traditionally called nyanyas (wet-nurses). And the famous nyam-nyam (yum-yum) is just a fusion of two feeding sounds n and m. By the way, when it is especially delicious, children like to click their tongue and pronounce the famous childrens word naka, which means delicious. In English this word sounds a little different: nice. Among the Greeks, nostimo (νόστιμο), although it has the same meaning nice.
However, there was not always enough food. Sometimes it was necessary to eat anything spoiled or fermented fruit or carrion. How does the body react to harmful food? It rejects it. And what is the sound produced while vomiting? The sound is complex: both growling and plaintive. Over time, the sound formed is one of the oldest protoroot mr with meaning mertvyy (dead).
There are a huge number of words with this root in the world. In Russian, this word is smert (death) with all its derivatives: smrad (stench), merzost (abomination) and others. This is the word moroz (frost) that kills all living things. This is the more (sea), the famous mertvaya voda (dead water), which is not suitable for drinking, but has nevertheless healing properties, and has retained its name in Russian folk tales about living water and dead water. This is the Greek God of dreams Morpheus and even the science morfologiya (morphology). Surprisingly, the word mir (peace) is also formed by this protoroot. But the interpretation of this word is a little creepy: mir is when everyone is killed, all are dead, there is no one to fight and the war ends.
The sounds of the food include protoroots gr, kr, hr. Their meaning goes back to the concept of krepkiy (strong)this is the sound of krosheniya (crumbling), khrusta (crunching). It appeared when a person had to chew bones, or sand and stones enter into his mouth with food. And the sand khrustel (crunched), and the teeth kroshilis (crumbled)! Next to them growling sounds of aggression appear. Growling, as a rule, was accompanied by a demonstration of teeth, and the sound warned that the enemy will stratch. Hence the whole galaxy of rvanyh (torn) words: rychat (to growl), ristat (to fight), rvat (to tear), rubit (to hack), rezat (to cut), rana (wound).
Another palette of protoroots formed the sounds of drinking. In ancient times, there were no glasses and mugs, so our ancestors drank either from reservoirs, or, to get running water into the palm of their hand, they drew it in, as sometimes children or tourists do. What kind of sound is produced by such a drink? Only the sound of ms. M is the sound of food, but in this case it is liquid food, the consumption of which is accompanied by a whistling sound the sound s. It formed protoroot with the meaning drinking water. It can be found everywhere in the names of localities, where water is suitable for drinking. There are a lot of such toponyms\place names on the planet I found more than three hundred of them on the map, although I assume that there are many more. This is our Moskva reka (Moscow river), the Mississippi, the Temza (the Thames), and lake Michigan. This root has been preserved in various languages for example, in Japanese, where there is still the word mizi with the meaning water and there is the word mizimi with the meaning lake.
Like all protoroots, the sounds of drinking too, lived their own lives, grew up and changed. So, in a number of languages, the sound of closed lips, the sound of eating m disappeared, and only the whistling s remained. For example, in the Turkic languages su means water. The English word sea is similar. And somewhere the whistling s evolved into hissing sounds.
The sounds of drinking can also include the sound of slurp in thick, hot and delicious food. Imagine that you have made soup, but instead of eating it with a spoon, you try to drink it directly from the pot. What kind of sound is produced? It is mixed sound khl. Many words were formed from this sound: khl`ebat (to slurp), khl`upat (to slurp), khl`eb (bread), khal`va (halva), kha`lyava (freebie), and even khl`yabi nebesnye (heavenly bread or slush), which are heard in the name of the city where I have lived all my life and which I love Chelyabinsk
Unnecessary knowledge or two words about entropy
Why am I telling it for you? I want that it will be clear: there are no meaningless words or meaningless sounds in the world. Words didnt fall from the sky. When the first sounds appeared, they already had some meaning, carried a semantic load. In other words, all the ancient phonemes were already morphemes in their own way. This semantic load has not disappeared we just stopped noticing it. But even in those words that we borrow from other languages, when parsing it turns out that these words have returned to us like a boomerang, preserving their root basis, their sound history, which goes back to ancient times. And if you want to learn and to understand words, you need to be able to look into this story.
What do we know from the history of the language? I remind it very briefly. We know that Russian language belongs to the Indo-European language group. The concept of Indo-Europeans was formed relatively recently, when India was colonized. A little later, the English philologist William Jones, studying Sanskrit, an ancient Indian language, and comparing it with European languages, was one of the first to suggest that before the appearance of all these languages there was one, common to them, more ancient, some proto-Indo-European language. And then scientists came to the conclusion that there were even older languages, so-called Nostratic languages, common not only to Indo-Europeans, but also to other language groups.
But this is only the top layer of the story. Russian scientist Svetlana Burlak experimentally proves that even ants have their own language, and they are able to exchange information. The development of language is directly related to the evolution of man with the development of his brain, improving from simple to complex. But if we automatically inherit the brain with all its potential from our parents, from nature, then it is impossible to inherit knowledge. Knowledge is accumulated, but not inherited. I did not complain for nothing that the Greeks had lost the meaning of the metaphor of the myth of Sisyphus. For every new inhabitant of the planet, civilization begins with a void, from scratch. Every new inhabitant of the planet has to repass all the way that humanity has passed for hundreds, thousands and even millions years.
Continuity is very important here. Any violation of continuity in the transmission of knowledge leads to its distortion, loss, degradation, degeneration and even death. This can also be observed in the animal world especially when people try to return to the wild, for example, chicks who have lost their parents, and even teach them to fly on a hang glider. Its much more complicated for a human. Neurolinguists believe that the mechanism of thinking in humans is triggered by speech sounds. Just those sounds of speech that we are considering and that accompanied it throughout its evolution. What does launch mean? Lets assume that some sounds inherent in the life of the baby and its environment are installed on empty brain cells, after which the simplest cause-and-effect relationships are established between the sensations of the baby and the sounds. Gradually, these connections become more complex. This is very similar to installing an operating system on a computer, where consistency is also important.
Knowledge from simple to complex was passed down over many generations first within the herd, within the pack, within the family. Then the way changed, subordinating the structure of knowledge: they improved. Science appeared, knowledge was multiplied and systematized. Once, about forty years ago, I heard the phrase unnecessary knowledge from a young aspiring scientist-teacher. The accumulated knowledge began to be sifted through the sieve of demand. As a result, all this resulted in a kind of standard cultural transmission, which both teachers and parents are still experimenting with. And since language is the main tool for knowledge transfer, any change in language related to its development also affected the continuity of knowledge transfer.
I give an example. Many of us studied from the famous textbook of the Russian language Phonetics and morphology by the authors Barkhudarov and Kryuchkov. Phonetics studies phonemes speech sounds, morphology studies the structure of words morphemes, roots and affixes. And the word morfema (morpheme) comes from the Greek word morfa (morph). Despite the fact that the Greek word morph has already changed significantly relative to the known protoroot mr or proto-Indo-European mr-timertviy, umirat (dead, to die), it retains the root basis. That is, morfa (morth) is something dead, frozen and motionless.
Another thing is the Latin word forma (form) borrowed from the Greek. Although it retained the main phonemes and consonance with the word morfa (morph), but the root mr was changed, lost. Therefore, the word forma has become an abstract set of sounds with the same shade of dead and frozen, but the root basis has been lost. There was an interruption of continuity. It is similar to Shakespeares Hamlet: The time is out of joint
Recently, on the website of the famous economist Mikhail Khazin, I read an article by Professor Vladimir Arnold, where he shared his experience of teaching mathematics in France. In the article, he complained about the growing number of students who simply remember information without understanding its essence. This is akin to our rote learning. We also had virtuosos at school who could memorize entire paragraphs and not just memorize them, but even compile stories from them. Usually these virtuosos were admitted to the Humanities, where the lack of understanding can be compensated by memorizing. But this was about mathematics and eloquence cant buy it. Thats why the Professor sounded the alarm.
There has always been a problem in the transmission of content and its perception. When I was a student at a Soviet school, at a Soviet Institute, the teachers constantly told us: Try to understand the meaning, the content, do not get carried away with the form. There was even a literary saying that the form is only a slave designed to serve the content.
We often underestimate what they are trying to convey to us. For example, etymology is considered to be a kind of entertainment, an educational quiz, although it is one of those sciences that can teach people to think by returning to the protolanguage and discovering old new meanings.
Russian language plays a special role. There are scientists who suggest that all the languages of the planet are descended from the Russian language. It is possible that the Russian language has been preserved better than other languages relative to the primordial language of mankind. But to say that all languages came from Russian is, of course, an ironic exaggeration. All languages have ancient roots. If, as geneticists believe, humanity comes from a single family, then we can assume that the origins of all languages are also hidden in the language of this ancient ancestral community. A well-known linguist Alexander Dragunkin, who is a professional English language learner, believes that for a better understanding of the language, you need to know Russian, which is a kind of key to the meanings of English words. I absolutely agree with it. And I believe that the same applies to the Greek language and to other language groups. Our language has preserved its attachment to its natural origin as much as possible, and its phonetic series has remained largely faithful to the oldest protoroots. We just need to get back to them.