RECENTLY I came across an article that said scientists had discovered a strange pattern when it came to the world’s languages... well two-thirds of them.
Apparently words with the same meanings in different languages often seem to share the same sounds – even when those two languages are completely unrelated.
The findings, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, run counter to a long-held idea in linguistics and could complicate the work of researchers trying to trace the history and evolution of the world’s languages.
“The idea that there is essentially no relation between sound and meaning has existed for more than a century. And, it strikes at something really intuitive,” says Damian Blasi, a language data scientist at the University of Zurich in Switzerland.
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.
Certainly, you might find related words within a language that sound alike – like glance, glimmer and glare in English, which all have to do with vision and begin with a “gl.” But that doesn’t mean you would find the same “gl-” cluster across other languages as well.
And although there is no hard data supporting this, advancements in computing and modern statistical methods now mean that, instead of comparing a few or a few dozen languages, scientists could do what generations of linguists before them could not and that is analyse thousands of language data sets at once!
The team studied nearly 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.
Many languages share words that have similar sounds because they’re either “descended” from the same original language (such as Spanish “hospital” and French “hopital,” both of which arose from Latin) or because they’ve borrowed heavily (as English did after the French invaded in the Norman Conquest of 1066). The researchers had to make sure to rule out sound patterns that were similar simply because two languages were related.
Some researchers, however, disagree about which languages are related and how. So the researchers based their analyses on two different linguistic family trees, looking for patterns that were clear enough to survive under both models.
And what they found is a number of sound/meaning relationships that cropped up across unrelated languages.
For example, words for “tongue” often tend to have an “l” or a “u” (such as the Spanish “lengua”). Words for “nose” often have an “n” sound. Words for “round” often have an “r,” and “small” is associated with “ee” sounds.
The findings may have implications for linguists who look for shared sounds (and predictable changes) in current and older written languages to try to reconstruct their ancient, long-gone ancestors.
This 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 calls into question some of the attempts that people have put forward in order to determine the prehistory of many linguistic families,” says Blasi.
This could throw a curveball into the work of researchers tracing our linguistic heritage. “The more we look into languages, the more we learn that they are extremely complex and that we have to take them seriously,” says Blasi.
You don’t say!!