The Imitative Origins of Primary Arabic Roots

To the sons of Shem we owe the two most precious possessions of mankind: The first of them is the Alphabet ; the second is the Book and the Religion of the Book." (The Alphabet by Isaac Taylor pp. [...] The reason why we have selected the sound of"( 19 ) the (a) type for our illustration is that such a sound is the simplest of all the four types and is the most homogenious of those types and that after tracing the formation of a root from the (a) type the tracing of the formation of primary roots from other types is an easy task. [...] It is a mixture of the nasal and the asperate When a horse snorts the impression left on the mind of the hearer is not of one elementary sound but that of a mixture of 6; and ) The sound produced in scratching is not one elementary sound but seems to consist of and ) The sound produced in drinking seems to be a mixture of and y. The sound heard in the yearing cry of a she camel uttered from [...] By the help of (i) the voluntary acts of the imitator consising of gestures to indicate the object he means (2) the knowledge common to his hearers that the vocal copy is the imitation of a particular original known to them and (3) the operation of the law of association that root begins to denote either the perceptible object from which the sound cameor the perceptible action which accordi [...] In order to distinguish the imitation of the sound of the tearing a cloth from the imittion of the sound of the floing of a rivulet the form given to the first is jy& while the form given to the latter is The original function or the primary meaning of 37i is He in cutting a long piece of hide with a blunt knife or in tearing a course cloth produced a sound the imitation of which is 3)&