Breathing and movement have always been characteristics of a living human. In some languages the word for movement (animation) resembles the word for spirit/breath (Latin anima) in another language. Greek Zoi from which Zoo shows a similar relation (life vs the animals). The Biblical story of Adam and Eve is a rewriting to suit monotheïsm but it shows earth (Adam) and heaven (Eve) to have been considered our original ‘ancestors’ in the Israelites’ worldview. This originates from a world view where the body falls to the earth after death and the spirit/breath goes to heaven. The spirit became personified later on as a seperate entity while it is in essence the breath of life. The word life is abstract and comes from an older concrete word for feet as can still be seen in the resemblance between English ‘life’ and German ‘laufen’ (to walk) and the ‘soles of the feet’ is that which gives you movement which is cognate to anima and that is why these words look so similar to words with a meaning of living and breathing.
Similarities that are no coincidence:
Spirit: breath, bird, bread, birth
Anime: animal, name, animate
Life: laufen, love, elevate
Leg: ciel, soul, keel (Dutch)
Foot: pt (sky in hieroglyphs, tepe (hill), top, body
Bein (German leg): nebo (Russian sky), oben (above in German), nebula, to be, B hieroglyph is a leg
Zoi: Chi (Hebrew life), zoo, qi (life energy in Chinese), Ka (the double (spirit) in Egyptian texts), to go (which refers to motion)
Adam: atmen (to breath in German) Important to note is that the dead bodies fall back to the earth as they die so the invertion of Adam/Atmen in consonant phonemes is ‘mt’ which is the consonantal foundation of Semitic words having to do with tomb and death. This is why ‘mute and deaf’ are euphemisms for death:
-mute: mut (death)
-deaf: death
Without breath there is no Word. This resulted in the spirit of god being the word in the beginning. Spirit is breath and the creative ability of breath is words, so the word God had to be uttered for the spirit to animate itself.
“The soles of my feet go up into the air that I breathe and animate my body.”
This sentence can be understood as a description of life, and the individual meanings have differentiated into the different languages. It should be possible to reconstruct which meaning originally belonged to what phonemes by identifying the meanings of the individual phonemes within the words.
Breath: B-R-Th is descriptive for sky/up-air/sun/-body. A bird has the ability to bring its body into the air. At birth is the first moment where the body inhales air; the breath meaning the same.
To go: this sound is not the original as the original underwent many sound changes. To chew is one of those changes where the motion refers to the jaw. Chew can be decompounded to (and I simplify here) ‘go-jaw’ which describes the ‘motion of the jaw’ literally.
B as a hieroglyph for leg shows how words like beth (Hebrew house), bath and bed are described as B-T (legs on the earth) thus lying down. That is what you do in your habitat, bath and bed. It describes that you are not standing on the legs or moving them but they are on the ground, resting.
B=legs
Th/T=earth
An example of how phonemes describe the meaning of the words bath, bed and beth.
Basically many of what we now know as nouns used to be short descriptive phrases with phonemes that each had a couple of rudimentary meanings that could be used to express a characteristic of what the noun stands for. And words for life and breath belong to the oldest category and are therefor easier to decompound to their rudimentary descriptions as later words. With a world view that saw the body as the earth and the breath as the sky returning to both when dying, these became our cosmic parents in the most Ancient world views. That is why many languages have such similarities. A shared origin.
