THE GENEALOGY OF WORDS
Each word consists of two merged halves: the sound and the meaning (i.e. the form and the content), like a person with its body and soul.
Human owes his birth to his/her father and mother. The word is also born by the fusion of meaning (the masculine beginning) and an external, "bodily" shell (the feminine beginning), that is, when the separated and isolated unit of meaning acquires its outer shell and is fixed inside of its verbal and written forms.
The male beginning makes up an insignificant part of the material from which the body of an adult is subsequently formed. On the contrary, the feminine beginning, the embryo, already at the birth of the child is a very tangible body, weighing about 3.5 kilograms. Consequently, the masculine beginning is rather a spiritual one, energetic in nature, and the feminine is rather material, corporeal. In childbirth, the masculine principle dominates. A person's life begins with it. Then the mother bears and feeds the fetus.
Similarly, in the birth of a word, priority is also given to the spiritual, semantic, “masculine” beginning. The word sets off with the emergence of thought, the formation of a certain independent concept. Material (that is, maternal, the "matter") only formalizes, consolidates and preserves this concept in a sound shell.
The purpose of word genealogy as a branch of linguistics is to identify and show the continuous relationship of words of all languages and their variants (dialects and speeches).
All words of all languages of mankind are related to each other. All peoples once closely communicated with each other.
The proof of this fact entails an inevitable conclusion: our ancestors were in close touch in the past, and this requires that we must be together in the present and in the future. Languages should not divide the inhabitants of the Earth. On the contrary, they are called upon to unite humanity into a single family. As rivers, seas and oceans became roads from country to country with the invention of the navy, so the languages become the linking international paths with the development of word lineages.
Valery D. Osipov, PhD
