Actually I learned more than average today, and it’s only 1:04.

Anyway, here’s something I learned that I thought was really interesting. I’m reading a book called The Unfolding of Language: An Evolutionary Tour of Mankind’s Greatest Invention by Guy Deutscher. In it, I learned this interesting fact.

All the languages I (and presumably you, gentle reader) am familiar with use prefixes, suffixes, and additional marker words to indicate things like tense, person, gender, and plurality:

I say
She says

Yo digo
Ella dice

I/you/she will say
Ella dirá

Arabic, however, takes a different approach. Rather than add extra words or tack letters on the beginning or ends of words to denote these changes, Arabic relies on a base set of three consonants that represent a concept, and then vowels are inserted between and around the consonants to make the word take different forms. And not just tenses and gender, no! They can mean widely varied things based on the vowel combinations, but they still take root in the three-consonant set.

For example…the words Islam, Muslim, Solomon, and Salaam are all, at their core, the same word (s-l-m, in that order). s-l-m is never pronounced by itself, but it means “be at peace.” i-a, [m]u-i, o-o-o, and a-a-a, respectively, are what give the words their nuances. They have evolved in meaning throughout the centuries, but the etymology of each relates to “be at peace.”

Fascinating!