\u003cP\u003e\u003cEM\u003eWhat is life?\u003c/EM\u003e is a query that never dies⦠Most modern-day approaches to this enduring question attempt to define what life \u003cI\u003eis\u003c/I\u003e, from the standpoint of science, philosophy, religion, medicine, etc. In this book, the conception of life in Western culture is explored through a host of words that has come down to us from antiquity. The author presents a flowing linguistic view of life from the distant past. The etymologic heritage is traced to ancient Greek â to the philosophical foundation of Western thinking. The author pursues a path into prehistory, looking at the development of words from roots in the Indo-European language family, which includes the classical languages of Greek and Latin, as well as English and many other Eurasian languages â ultimately, in the common ancestral Proto-Indo-European (PIE) tongue. In so doing, one finds a shared lexical genealogy underlying the linguistic source of the Western notions of life. The diversity of word-forms that are associative of life in todayâs vernacular grew out of a seemingly labyrinthine â though, in reality, a highly integrative â state of comprehension of the affiliation between the mortal human being and the natural environment in the prehistoric PIE civilization. In the \u003cI\u003elogos \u003c/I\u003eof ancient Greek thought, emanating from the ancestral \u003cI\u003emythos \u003c/I\u003eof the PIE and early Mediterranean peoples, the ideas of \"life\" and \"nature\" were fused into a unified vision of existence â as can be seen in the prehistoric origin of the verb \u003cI\u003ebe \u003c/I\u003eitself. This book concentrates on more than sheer words; it is also on how we â the living, sentient beings that we are â speak of our very being in space and time in the world around us. The birthright of a conjoined sentience of life and nature has branched-out through the ages of Western thinking. The legacy today is a fossilized linguistic Tree of Life, engendering a plurality of words for \"life\"; wherein, each of us must create our own meaning of \"life.\" \u003c/P\u003e
nl
en