Читать книгу Etymology of meanings. Brief etymological dictionary of planetary toponyms. At the origins of civilization - Alexander Tokiy - Страница 7

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 didn’t 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. It’s 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? Let’s 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-ti”—mertviy, 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 Shakespeare’s “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 can’t buy it. That’s 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.