Researchers often discount the idea that sounds might have some relationship to the meaning of their words in part because it encourages half-baked thinking that could lead to flawed science, Blasi said.
Advertisement
The new research, led by Prof.
Certain words are also likely to avoid certain sounds – you’re less likely to find a u, p, b, t, s, r or l in words for “I”, and “you” is unlikely to include u, o, p, t, d, q, s, r or l sounds in most languages.
Recent studies have suggested some words share common sounds.
“These sound symbolic patterns show up again and again across the world, independent of the geographical dispersal of humans and independent of language lineage”, Morten Christiansen, co-author and director of Cornell’s Cognitive Neuroscience Lab, said in a statement.
Other words found to contain similar sounds across thousands of languages include “bite”, “dog”, “fish”, “skin”, “star” and “water” The associations were particularly strong for words that described body parts, like “knee”, “bone” and ‘breasts’.
Looking at this phenomenon, researchers at Cornell’s Cognitive Neuroscience Lab in the USA have found we use similar sounds for the words of common objects and ideas, suggesting that humans may speak the same language.
The team studied almost two-thirds of the world’s 6,000-plus languages using word lists covering about 100 shared basic concepts, checking to see if similar sounds kept cropping up.
The team, which included physicists, linguists and computer scientists from the US, Argentina, Germany, the Netherlands and Switzerland, analysed 40-100 basic vocabulary words in about 3700 languages – approximately 62 per cent of the world’s current languages.
To their surprise, words about parts of the body had a strong similarity between varieties of languages.
The word for tongue was “likely to have “l” – as in “langue” in French”.
The words for “red” and “round” often appear with “r, ‘ and ‘small” with ‘i’. “We didn’t quite expect that”, Prof.
The discovery challenges one of the fundamental principles of linguistics, that the relationship between a sound of a word and its meaning is arbitrary. This was especially true for pronouns. This held even if the languages came from completely different lineages, meaning that they never borrowed from each other. He even tested this problem out at a conference a few years ago by making up links between words and sounds – “fire” and the sound of “t”, for example – and would randomly ask people to explain these associations. For instance, earlier studies showed that words for smaller objects are more likely to contain high-pitched sounds. Blasi’s study shows that some of those shared characteristics between “sister” languages may not be inherited from a “mother” language; instead, they could have arisen independently, simply because humans tend to like certain sounds with certain words. “That’s a key question for future research”, said Christiansen.
Advertisement
“Maybe it has something to do with the human mind or brain, our ways of interacting, or signals we used when we learn or process language”.
