Investigating Students’ Appreciation of Cross-linguistic Morpho-phonological Analysis of English Words via Arabic Roots to Expose Arabic Meanings Embedded in English Vocabulary.

Abstract

When a group of languages share a common origin, they can be considered as a language family known as "Protolanguage". For instance, English is believed to belong to the Indo European family of languages, while Arabic is thought to have descended from a language known as Proto-Semitic. It follows that English and Arabic are expected to be structurally distinct Languages. However, many English words are observably similar to their counterparts in Arabic. Furthermore, if analysed morphologically as well as phonologically, almost every English word proves to have a direct cognate in Arabic whose sense could be much revealing of the origin it has developed from. Accordingly, this study is envisaged to investigate students’ attitudes concerning the use of Morpho-phonological analysis of English vocabulary via Arabic lexical roots together to gain new insights into the closeness of these two languages, ever thought so distant. Thus, this study contends that English is of a Semitic origin, and so, if students are exposed to Cross-linguistic Morpho-phonological Analysis (CLMPA), their cultural awareness regarding the statuses of English and Arabic will be raised in favour of the recognition of Arabic ancestry. To achieve the research aims of this study, the data were collected through one research tool, a questionnaire. The latter was administered to thirty-five second year Master students at the department of English. The findings reveal that CLMPA has substantially succeeded in exposing the Arabic meanings embedded in English vocabulary, and so, raising students’ cultural awareness regarding the unexpressed parentage of the two languages