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Generation Before Abstraction: A Critique of Greek-Centric Historical Linguistics

Against Greek-Centric Abstractionism Generation, Quantity, and the Misordering of Semantic History Greek-centric historical linguistics has long suffered from a systematic inversion of semantic chronology. By privileging abstract lexical forms preserved in Classical Greek—particularly adjectives of quantity such as πολλά (“many”)—it mistakes philological visibility for semantic primacy. This error is not incidental; it is structural. At the core of this paradigm lies an unexamined assumption: that the earliest attestable abstractions in Greek texts reflect the earliest stages of linguistic meaning itself. This assumption collapses immediately when confronted with cognitive, typological, and anthropological evidence. 1. The Greek fallacy: abstraction as origin Greek-centric models routinely treat abstract categories—number, measure, plurality—as primary semantic units, simply because they are lexicalized early in written Greek. This is a methodological fallacy. Writing preserves late c...
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From Light to Knowledge: The Albanian Semantic Engine Behind Indo-European Seeing and Knowing

The Emergence of an “Engineering Language” from the Symbolic Root di The so-called “technical” or “engineering” forms of Indo-European languages—Latin vidēre, Greek oida, Sanskrit véda, and so on—are not arbitrary lexical innovations. They are the fossilized remnants of a fully articulated symbolic system, still alive and transparent in Albanian. At its core lies the root di / dia, encoding sun, light, visibility, and knowing, combined with spatial or perceptual operators such as ve / vi (“place, position, orientation”) or sy (“eye”). The fundamental equation is simple, elegant, and mechanical: LIGHT → VISIBILITY → SEEING → KNOWING Albanian preserves this semantic machine in its living grammar, while other Indo-European languages have reduced it to fragments—isolated words, abstract roots, and fossilized forms. The “seeing–knowing” root in Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, and Germanic languages is not a reflection of independent invention but a derivative, opaque shadow of what Albanian still a...

αἰδώς Reconsidered: Why Albanian Preserves What Greek Philology Lost

Cham Albanian and the Root “di” In the Cham Albanian dialect, the expression “ u di ” (standard “ u gdhi ”) means “it dawned / it became day.” This is not a poetic metaphor but an ordinary, living usage: u di → impersonal, intransitive → literally: “it became known / it became visible” → semantically: light appeared; darkness ended u gdhi → from gdhihem / gdhi, “to dawn; to wake into daylight” → more concrete, but semantically equivalent The decisive point—systematically ignored in Greek-centric etymology—is that di here does not mean “to know” in a modern cognitive sense. It preserves an archaic semantic identity: di = to see = to become visible light → visibility → consciousness This is not speculative reconstruction; it is direct linguistic evidence, still functioning in a living Balkan language. Cham Albanian exposes the pre-abstract layer from which later philosophical meanings were derived—and subsequently obscured. The Root “di” and the Semantic Mechanics of αἰδώς The key to un...

αἰδώς Revisited: When Greek Abstraction Fails and Albanian Explains

Back to Beekes: αἰδώς and the Failure of the PIE Abstraction 1. The Data Greek Cannot Explain In the Cham Albanian dialect, the expression “ u di” (standard “ u gdhi ”) means “it dawned / it became day.” This is not a poetic metaphor but an ordinary, living usage. u di → impersonal, intransitive → literally: “it became known / it became visible” → semantically: light appeared; darkness ended u gdhi → from gdhihem / gdhi, “to dawn; to wake into daylight” → more concrete, but semantically equivalent The decisive point—systematically ignored in Greek-centric etymology—is that di here does not mean “to know” in a modern cognitive sense. It preserves an archaic semantic identity: di = to see = to become visible light → visibility → consciousness This is not speculative reconstruction; it is direct linguistic evidence, still functioning in a living Balkan language. Cham Albanian thus exposes the pre-abstract layer from which later philosophical meanings were derived—and subsequently obs...

Symbolic–Semantic Continuity and the Limits of Reconstruction in Indo-European Etymology

6. Hypothesized Primordial Phonetic–Symbolic Units and Their Reflexes in European Languages This study further proposes that a limited set of primordial phonetic–symbolic units, associated with the mouth, sound production, and articulated speech, underlies a broad range of lexical formations across European languages. These units are not presented as directly reconstructible Proto-Indo-European roots in the strict comparative sense, but as pre-lexical symbolic elements that may predate formal linguistic differentiation and later grammaticalization. 6.1. A / HA / FOL / FIAL / ZË, ZO, ZA: Mouth, Consumption, and Sound The vocalic element A, together with related Albanian forms such as ha (“to eat”), fol (“to speak”), and zë (“sound, voice”), is interpreted here as encoding the mouth as both an organ of intake and articulation. Symbolically, this cluster represents a nexus uniting eating, breathing, and vocalization—core biological functions mediated by the oral cavity. From an anthropolo...

Primordial Symbolism and the Etymology of Kalendae: A Comparative-Philological and Cognitive Perspective

Abstract This study examines the Latin term Kalendae through a multi-dimensional philological framework, integrating phonological, semantic, symbolic, and comparative perspectives. While mainstream etymology derives Kalendae from calendae (“first day of the month”) and calendarium (“account book, register”), this analysis investigates the underlying conceptual structures preserved across Indo-European languages. Albanian, Greek, and Proto-Indo-European (PIE) roots are examined to identify primordial phonetic–symbolic units that encode emergence, separation, and temporal transition. The findings suggest that Kalendae reflects an ancient cosmological understanding of time, subsequently formalized in Roman ritual and administrative practice. This approach demonstrates that etymology can reveal deep symbolic and cognitive continuities underlying lexical evolution. Keywords Kalendae, Albanian, Greek καλέω, Proto-Indo-European, etymology, symbolic semantics, comparative philology, temporal c...

A Symbolic–Semantic Approach to Etymology: Methodological Considerations for Deep Comparative Analysis

Etymology, properly understood, is concerned with the origin and development of the constituent elements of a word, not simply with the word as a fixed lexical unit. Consequently, a comprehensive analysis requires consideration of multiple perspectives—phonological, semantic, symbolic, and comparative—rather than relying on a single comparative explanatory framework. The current approach seeks to trace the origin of words through the partiality of elements in place of the basic symbolic element, rather than through later administrative or functional partial meanings of the word that may represent later historical layers. From this perspective, primordial symbolism constitutes a generative substrate from which multiple lexical forms have emerged, subsequently changing in meaning over time and across languages. Within this framework, a limited set of archaic phonetic-symbolic units - such as bhë, bho, bha, bher, al, el, ar, ol, oi, oia, ui, ul, i, o, zë, zhër, zhor, zhur, za, zan, da, nd...