Tuesday, February 16, 2010

Fables of Famous Fairies and Blasphemous Bandits

To start this post, I'm going to try and teach just a moment about how one ancient sound (root) can wind up going so many different (and apparently unrelated) directions.  Take the root: bha(2).  Before we discuss its meaning, let's consider what this root could wind up sounding like.  Drop the h and you have the ba sound.  Keep the h and turn the b upside down to p (happens all the time) and you have pha / fa.  Of course, the vowel sounds are always complete wild cards.  Regional accents usually mess with the vowels.  For example, In Texas, if you want your iced tea all the way to the top of the glass, you say "feel it up", but you mean "fill".  So keep an eye on the consonant sounds and just let the vowels come and go as they please.  Our IE root today, bha, will clearly demonstrate this kind of sonic ADD.

At it's heart, bha is a real big talker - it means "to speak".  We speak to tell a fable and sometimes our fables speak of the antics of fairies (characters in spoken fables).  Fables often tell lessons through the fates of the actors (fate meaning a spoken outcome).  A baby just learning to speak is an infant, a guy who talks a lot is called affable, and some people (especially among the elderly) suffer aphasia - the inability to speak.  I think you can see that famous (spoken of far and wide) and fabulous (spoken highly of) fandangoes (no clue!) are also downstream cousins of ancient bha.

When we speak of our beliefs we confess what we believe.  If we speak against what others believe they say we blaspheme.

If we don't like something and want to run it out of town, we ban it and bannish it (see, we dropped the h).  Even though it got banned, some people still seek contraband with reckless abandon.  If those naughty boys call (speak) a bunch of their kind together, we call them bandits.

If we hold onto the ph/f sound and listen for the o sound, we'll discover the very core of spoken word sounds - phonics and phonetics.  Of course, to speak at a distance we need a telephone (far + sound).  If musical instrument sounds all come together just right we enjoy the symphony (together + sound).

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