San Diego State University, USA
Vol.6 No.1 (Serial No.8) 2018
1-16
2018-06-30
This article integrates the Hebrew consonantal root into linguistic theory, with a theoretical claim (“nanosematics”) that has broad implications for possible new research directions in other languages and in general linguistic theory. Nanosemantics uses an innovation that has in fact been anticipated and even somewhat widely accepted for almost as long as the Saussurian “axioms” that it seems to overturn. This innovation is the “submorpheme”, including phonesthemes (lexical clusters). The seemingly “heretical” dual claim here is that (1) consonants are meaningful, and vowels are meaningless, and (2) the first consonant in any lexical root or affix in itself is a “Semantic Key”, giving a broad characterization of the meaning of the whole word (or affix). Saussure’s lexical arbitrariness is here revised to apply only to the Remainder of the root or affix, as distinct from the Key-consonant. So in nanosemantics as hypothesized here, English Hunker consists of a semantic Key H, meaning HUG, and the Remainder -unker, which distinguishes Hunker from Bunker, but is arbitrary (has no meaning) in itself. As a special implication, nanosemantics reveals many hundreds of Lexical Parallels within and between languages. These include (1) Spanish Pan ‘bread’ and Chinese Fan ‘rice’; (2) the Hebrew plural ending -iM with Chinese plural -Men, and also full words like Hebrew ºaM and Chinese Min, both meaning ‘people’, as well as English Many, Russian Mnogo ‘much, Many’, etc., all based on the hypothesized meaning of M, namely TOGETHER. For clarity, we will call these “Nano-Parallels”. They include English Now/New and Greek Nyn/Neos, and many others. They offer a deeper and broader Key to lexicon than etymology (word-origins), especially because they reflect a coherent theory of lexicon (lexical semantics).
consonantal roots, submorphemes, phonesthemes, nanosemantics, Key-letters, Nano-Parallels
doi: 10.26478/ja2018.6.8.1
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