Liberties There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence

“Whoever knows the nature of the name… knows the nature of the thing itself, ” Plato observed in his Cratylus. To know is a complex verb, difficult but rich. According to the dictionary, it means “to have news of a thing,” “to know that it exists or what it is.” In classical languages, the concept of knowing was linked with being born. Thus by coming into the world others have “news” about us: their recognition of us is part of our birth. Knowing the roots of the words at the basis of human relationships permits us to revive a world in which individuals existed as men and women or boys and girls with no middle ground. I will explain what that means. The ancestors of these appellations (woman, girl, man, boy) denoted a particular way of being that subsequent cultures have lost. As the meaning of the words changed, the beings themselves changed. Back then, before these semantic developments, it was understood that the condition of boyhood was synonymous with immaturity, and the divide between childhood and adulthood had to be put to the test of life. Moreover, youth and old age were not personal categories but attitudes of soul and mind. What follows is a sort of Indo-European family lexicon, and a portrait of a lost world. Mother The word comes from the Indo-European mater, formed by the characteristically childish elementary root ma– and the suffix of kinship –ter. In Greek it is mētēr, in Latin mater, in Sanskrit mātar, in Armenian mayr, in Russian mat, in German Mutter, in English mother, in French mère, in Italian, Spanish and Portuguese madre, in Irish máthair, in Bosnian majika. Father The word comes from the Indo-European pater, formed by the elementary root pa- and the suffix of kinship –ter. In Greek it is patèr, in Latin pater, in Sanskrit pitar, in ancient Persian pita, in Spanish, Italian and Portuguese padre, in French père, in German Vater, in English father. These terms are so ancient, so primordial that they have survived the history of languages   and the geography of peoples. Since they were first uttered, these words have consistently been among the first spoken by human beings. They are solid words, like a brick house, like a mountain. It is our fathers and our mothers who teach us first to name things. It is natural that a child should first articulate ma– or pa-. There is no child who does not seek to be loved and held, who is not in need of care and protection from a mother and father. And we never forget these words; we hold them inside ourselves all the way to the end. Studies on Alzheimer’s and senile dementia patients who have spoken a second language throughout their lives, a language different from that of their country of origin, show that they refer to dear ones using their original language. Native language. Mother-tongue. Human The classical etymology of the word man — meaning a human being — comes from the Latin homo, which dates back to the Indo-European root of humus, “earth,” a result of a primor-dial juxtaposition, perhaps even opposition, between mortal creatures and the gods of heaven. In the Bible, the Creator infuses earth with soul, creating the human compound. In French the term became homme, in Spanish hombre, a root that disappears in the Germanic languages, where we have man in English and Mann in German. The usage may now seem archaic, but it contains a universal idea. The Greek ànthrōpos has a disputed etymology. According to some, it is linked to the words anō, “up,” athréo, “look,” and òps, “eye,” a very fine combination of roots that indicates the puniness of men faced with the immensity of the divine and bound to raise their eyes to heaven from the ground. According to others, it is a descendent of the term anèr, “male,” “husband,” corresponding to the Latin vir. In both cases, the condition of “adult man” is colored by the concepts of strength, energy, ardor — of overcoming childhood through tests of courage, which reverberate in the Latin and Greek words vis and andreìa. Thus we have the universal concept of a human being who is small, humble, tied to the earth on which she has her feet firmly planted until the day of her death but not entirely material, puny but bent towards heaven – and also strong, therefore heroic, because she has succeeded in enlarging herself. In order to transition from girlhood to womanhood and from boyhood to manhood, one must pass a test. Through this test — or tests: the trials of a human life — girls and boys prove the measures of their strength, tenacity, and courage and in so doing become adults. Once the test is past, their nature itself is forever altered as their name is changed — no middle ground from girl to woman, from boy to man. Son, Daughter “Son” is connected with the Latin filius, “suckling,” linked to the root fe-, “sucking,” an affective and infantile term typical of the Indo-European –dhe, “to suckle,” which is found today in some Germanic languages as in the English word daughter or in the Bosnian one dijete, “boy.” The further we move away from the linguistic essence, from the primeval universality of the Indo-European roots, the more complicated things become, and the more the words grow apart and differ from Romance languages   to Germanic ones. The notion of “boy” or “girl” as adolescents still unprepared for adult life does not surface until the fourteenth century. This concept is a foreign loan that dates back to the late Middle Ages and derives from the Arabic raqqās, meaning “gallop,” or “courier,” or more specifically “boy who carries letters,” a term of Maghrebian origin probably spread from Sicily through port exchanges in the Mediterranean, which was so rich in Arabisms. (We may note that this etymology has been made irrelevant by the conditions of modern work, in which many adults