
Distant languages have similar sounds for common words - tintinnabula
http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21707183-researchers-uncover-ancient-links-between-majority-worlds
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hyperpallium
It is a curious fact, and one to which no one knows quite how much importance
to attach, that something like 85% of all known worlds in the Galaxy, be they
primitive or highly advanced, have invented a drink called jynnan tonnyx, or
gee-N'N-T'N-ix, or jinond-o-nicks, or any one of a thousand or more variations
on the same phonetic theme. The drinks themselves are not the same, and vary
between the Sivolvian 'chinanto/mnigs' which is ordinary water served at
slightly above room temperature, and the Gagrakackan 'tzjin-anthony-ks' which
kill cows at a hundred paces; and in fact the one common factor between all of
them, beyond the fact that the names sound the same, is that they were all
invented and named before the worlds concerned made contact with any other
worlds.

What can be made of this fact? It exists in total isolation. As far as any
theory of structural linguistics is concerned it is right off the graph, and
yet it persists. Old structural linguists get very angry when young structural
linguists go on about it. Young structural linguists get deeply excited about
it and stay up late at night convinced that they are very close to something
of profound importance, and end up becoming old structural linguists before
their time, getting very angry with the young ones. Structural linguistics is
a bitterly divided and unhappy discipline, and a large number of its
practitioners spend too many nights drowning their problems in Ouisghian
Zodahs.

~~~
jrcii
There's a visceral gratification in the pronunciation "ginin taw nick" it
rolls off the tongue, perhaps that is the root. My favorite word for this
reason is pumpernickel.

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micaksica
Pumpernickel. A very woody word. [1]

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gwXJsWHupg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gwXJsWHupg)

~~~
jrcii
That made my day, thanks :)

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lillesvin
This isn't really a new discovery. It has been common knowledge in linguistics
at least since the '70s that there is a universal tendency to use /i/-like
sounds in words that designate smallness and /o/ or /a/-like sounds in words
for the opposite. (Note: Tendency. There are plenty of counter-examples, but
the tendency is still there.) This is possibly linked to sound symbolism and
has to do with how you position your tongue when you say those vowels.
Possibly.

There are also plenty of older studies using made-up words that show that
people link /i/ sounds to sharpness and /o/~/a/ sounds to roundness. (E.g.
show a group of subjects a triangle and a hexagon and ask them which one they
think the word 'pirl' refers to. Then show another group the same shapes but
use the word 'porl' instead.)

Sound symbolism is super interesting. The Jabberwocky is a great example of
how certain phonemes/syllables can affect our interpretation despite not being
connected to each other in any immediately meaningful way.

~~~
aisofteng
My interpretation of the significance of the study this article is about was
that it is a very longitudinal study, demonstrating the patterns you mention
across thousands of languages.

Anecdotally speaking as a multilingual person, I've noticed some of the same
patterns - but untested, anecdotal comments aren't worth much; I find it
significant and interesting that (at least some of) these trends seem to hold
across thousands of languages. This isn't my field, though - is my impression
of the significance here correct?

A second question: isn't it the currently held theory in linguistics that
there is more or less a single "super parent" language - which my memory of my
intro to linguistics class from ten years ago identifies as Proto-Indo
European - and wouldn't that common linguistic ancestor provide a plausible
alternative explanation for this common sound symbolism?

A question tangentially related to the above: the sounds you mention are all
vowels, which are easier for infants to make and which infants tend to learn
to make first; it seems to stand to reason that sound symbolism tied to sounds
made earliest by infants would be more likely to be unchanged over time. Is
there anything that rules out this perspective? Building on this, I know that
there are some patterns to the development of abstract reasoning in children;
has there any work been done on correlating abstract reasoning development
timescales with the development of phonetic production skills? Perhaps this
sound symbolism has to do a parallel in the developmental timelines of these
two?

~~~
cafard
There was something called "Nostratic" hypothesized by some Russian linguists,
I think. But broad though its spread is, I don't think that Proto-Indo
European accounts even for all European languages--Hungarian, Basque, and
Finnish being outliers. However, I am not a linguist.

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hawkice
> The words for “nose”, for instance, often involve either an “n” sound or an
> “oo” sound, no matter the language in question.

The wording here is almost painful. You can't play "often" as a minimizer
against "no matter the X in question" like that. It is terribly confusing and
the mark of someone who wants to sound sure, isn't sure, and isn't capable of
making a more nuanced statement.

~~~
gnipgnip
In Japanese, it's "Hana", and in Mandarin it's "Bizi". Seems like they're only
talking about IE languages, and those influenced by them.

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lgessler
This isn't true--the study considered 4,000 languages from all the world's
major language families:
[http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2016/09/06/1605782113.abst...](http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2016/09/06/1605782113.abstract)

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partycoder
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouba/kiki_effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouba/kiki_effect)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_symbolism#Relationship_w...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_symbolism#Relationship_with_neuroscience)

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netule
There's not much too information in the article, to be honest. However, it's
an interesting notion to me because I've recently become very interested in
etymologies, specifically Proto-Indo-European. Since all people come from the
same place and have roughly the same features, it's not hard to imagine that
there was once a common shared tongue. After all, in the grand scheme of
things, these migrations didn't happen all too long ago. I wonder if this will
eventually lead to a new reconstructed language, something to tie together the
Afro-Asiatic, Indo-European, etc. Very exciting.

~~~
ClayFerguson
Checkout my post. I researched the timelines of when mammals appeared, when
primates appeared, and when the continents first separated. One conclusion is
that language existed WAY before even primates did.

On language: There is much to be learned from dolphins. They were just last
week reported to have been seen having an actual back and forth complex
conversation. Two dolphins were given a technical task to solve, and were
discussing how best to do it. Pretty amazing.

~~~
flukus
Considering our nearest ancestors don't have complex language I'd say
convergent/parallel evolution is a much more reasonable conclusion.

~~~
ClayFerguson
Dolphins have complex language using sound, and they are very distant cousins.
The fact that chimps don't talk is likely to be 50% because of inadequate
throat construction, and 50% lack of intelligence. Past extinct lifeforms
could have easily had vocal cords and intelligence. We just don't know. That's
the point of my post. The possibility exists that language first evolved
billions of years ago.

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ClayFerguson
175 million years ago all continents were merged into one, and about 65
million years ago primates appeared. If there is an actual historical link to
this language pattern, one possible explanation is that animals were able to
make sounds with vocal cords well before (like 100 million years before) we
actually were primates. This is not far fetched at all. Recently dolphins were
found to be having actual conversations. I mean mammals had been around 20
million years BEFORE the continents broke apart so perhaps there has always
been a "segment" of mammals that had the right brain nodules to control speech
and the requisite vocal cords also. Possibly the dino killing asteroid killed
off most of the 'talking mammals' and only left one group of mammals that had
these verbalizations, which were for some reason only transferred down one
evolutionary branch of the tree that ended up at humans. It makes sense that
it would always follow the branch of the volutionary tree that represents the
highest intelligence. Language and intelligence reinforce each other in an
evolutionary sense, so perhaps the value of speech just died out because it
had little value in most animals because they had no intelligence to develop
it further.

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x1798DE
This is a completely unnecessary hypothesis. At some point early on all
humankind was geographically co-located. If there are somewhat universal
features to language that were transmitted memetically, it's a much more
reasonable hypothesis that these are choices that were made before humanity
spread too widely.

~~~
ClayFerguson
The thing that makes this a mystery is that we think the continents separated
175 million years ago, but primates didn't evolve until only 50 million years
ago. I guess if there were still land-bridges between the continents 50
million years ago, then it makes sense that all humans are from the same small
tribe that spoke the same "original" language. Problem solved. But my point
was that language could have existed long before primates, and no one knows if
that's right or wrong. The fact that monkeys don't talk is moot, because they
are already 98% identical to humans so you can't make any argument based on
similarity. Based on genetics there is no analysis that would have predicted
monkeys wouldn't be able to speak, or for that matter be as intelligent as
man.

~~~
dragonwriter
> I guess if there were still land-bridges between the continents 50 million
> years ago

There are land connections between two groups (of 3 and 2) of the inhabited
continents _today_ , and as recently as _11,000_ years ago five of the six
human-inhabited continents were mutually connected by land.

~~~
ClayFerguson
Yeah the simplest explanation is the conventional one, which is that all
humans came from a common tribe that migrated out of africa long after the
continents had separated mostly, and the way they got to some of the
continents had to have been by boat. My initial post was merely saying how
interesting it would be that language could have evolved well before primates,
and we would have no way of knowing it. All you have to do is look at the fact
that dolphins have language, and are very intelligent. Intelligence and
language is far from being specific to human brains.

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danso
Any non-Asian languages use onomatopoeia as the basis for animal nouns? In
Vietnamese, the words for some common animals are basically the sound
associated with said animal, like referring to a cat as a _" meow"_:

[https://translate.google.com/?um=1&ie=UTF-8&hl=en&client=tw-...](https://translate.google.com/?um=1&ie=UTF-8&hl=en&client=tw-
ob#en/vi/cat%0Adog%0Acow%0Abird)

~~~
Udik
The funny thing is that "bo" means cow not only in Vietnamese but also in
Irish, as well as in some Italian dialects (though Irish and Italian share the
Indo-European roots). Does anybody know if the Vietnamese is in any way
connected?

~~~
wittekm
'bo*' is pretty common for cows in european languages - they are the genus
'bos' after all (see: english 'bovine').

As for the Vietnamese roots, I thought it might have been a French loanword
but it looks like it came from a proto-vietnamese language:
[https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/b%C3%B2#Etymology_1](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/b%C3%B2#Etymology_1)

~~~
nl
The Google etymology viewer is pretty good for this:
[https://www.google.com.au/search?q=etymology%20cow](https://www.google.com.au/search?q=etymology%20cow)

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snarfy
Ramachandran touches on this in his TED talk (starts around 21:20 )about
'kiki' vs 'babu'.

[https://www.ted.com/talks/vilayanur_ramachandran_on_your_min...](https://www.ted.com/talks/vilayanur_ramachandran_on_your_mind)

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kaushalmodi
The similarities among mother/mom (English), mádre (Spanish), ma (Chinese,
sorry if the intonation is wrong), ma/mata (Hindi) has perplexed me.

~~~
nybblet
The earliest sounds that babies make tend to be "ma/muh" sounds, as they're
smacking their lips to signal for food. Seems likely for language then to
develop that sound into the word for "mother", the nearest object (food source
as the case may be).

~~~
wahern
This pretty much explains away the entire article.

The progression of sounds that a baby learns is well understood, especially
the physiological aspects of language development and acquisition.

If we accept as a premise that cultures would tend to assign words most
relevant to babies according to their physiological capability, then it
becomes obvious why words for mother, father, and even facial features would
be strongly similar across cultures. And why the similarity will slowly
diminish as the meaning of words becomes less important, functionally, for
communication with a child.

And especially for simple words the phonetics would have very little to do
with cognitive development (and evolutionarily-dictated language models), but
be controlled almost entirely by a baby's physical constraints--e.g. huge
tongue in a tiny mouth, poor motor control, etc.

~~~
int_19h
It does explain similarity of words for familial relations, but not for things
like "nose". Babies don't randomly say "nose", or something that sounds
similar, while pointing at their nose.

~~~
snogglethorpe
Yeah, for a very, very, very small subset of words, the very first and most
immediate things babies care about, this theory makes some sense.

For everything else, not so much.

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wahern
100 basic words (the corpus of the study) is such a small subset, especially
if you posit very strong correlations among subsets of those 100 words most
likely to be used in the first year of life.

And especially considering that the researchers "reduced all sounds to 34
distinct consonants and 7 vowels." (Consider that the more we reduce and
simplify the vocalizations the more likely we should expect correlations. For
example, if we simplified all sounds to grunts we should expect tremendous
overlap.)

The correlation of the corpus of 100 words isn't particularly surprising given
what we already know about language development. The null hypothesis was that
there'd be no correlation whatsoever (i.e. the sounds would be completely
random), which I don't think anybody could reasonably expect.

~~~
Chathamization
Indeed. Especially when the article gives us this: "...the team found a lot
more consistency across languages than they had expected." What does that
mean? Were their originally expectations reasonable, or did they merely re-
discover the birthday paradox?

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QuercusMax
Link seems to be dead? Redirects me to front page of economist.com.

~~~
julian37
Try this:

[http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-
technology/2170718...](http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-
technology/21707183-researchers-uncover-ancient-links-between-majority-worlds)

~~~
sctb
Thank you! We updated the submission.

