Nearly two-thirds of the world’s languages often use similar sounds for common objects, such as the “n” sound for nose, international researchers said on Monday.
The study challenges a long-standing principle of linguistics, which holds that the relationship between sound and meaning is completely arbitrary, the report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences said.
“These sound symbolic patterns show up again and again across the world, independent of the geographical dispersal of humans and independent of language lineage,” said Morten Christiansen, a professor of psychology at Cornell University.
“There does seem to be something about the human condition that leads to these patterns. We don’t know what it is, but we know it’s there,” added Christiansen, director of Cornell’s Cognitive Neuroscience Lab.
For the study, scientists analyzed dozens of basic vocabulary words in 62 percent of the world’s more than 6,000 languages.
Pronouns, body parts, animals, adjectives and verbs to describe motion were all included.
Not all, but “a considerable proportion of the 100 basic vocabulary words have a strong association with specific kinds of human speech sounds,” the study said.
For instance, in most languages, the word for “nose” was likely to include the sounds “neh,” or the “oo” sound, as in “ooze,” it said.
The word for tongue was likely to have “l” — as in langue in French.
The word for “sand” was likely to include the “s” sound, while “r” sounds were likely to be included in the words for “red” and “round.”
“It doesn’t mean all words have these sounds, but the relationship is much stronger than we’d expect by chance,” Christiansen said.
Some of the strongest associations were among words for body parts.
However, the authors said that more research is needed to understand why certain sounds are linked to certain words.
The coauthors of the study came from the University of Zurich, University of Leiden, Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History and the University of Leipzig.
BACKING THE APPLICATION: Ankara’s move is expected to enable Helsinki to join the alliance, while the Turkish president is still opposed to backing Sweden’s application Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Friday ended months of diplomatically charged delays and asked the Turkish parliament to back Finland’s bid to join NATO. A simultaneous decision by fellow holdout Hungary to schedule a Finnish ratification vote for March 27 means the US-led defense alliance would likely grow to 31 nations within a few months. NATO’s expansion into a country with a 1,340km border with Russia would double the length of the bloc’s frontier with its Cold War-era foe. Finland had initially aimed to join together with fellow NATO aspirant Sweden, which is facing a litany of disputes with Turkey that
The US and the Philippines plan to announce new sites as soon as possible for an expanded Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (EDCA), which gives the Western power access to military bases in the Southeast Asian country. Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr last month granted the US access to four military bases, on top of five existing locations under the 2014 EDCA, amid China’s increasing assertiveness regarding the South China Sea and Taiwan. Speaking at the Basa Air Base in Manila, one of the existing EDCA sites, US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall said the defense agreements between the two countries
‘DUAL PURPOSE’: Upgrading the port is essential for the Solomon Islands’ economy and might not be military focused, but ‘it is not about bases, it is about access,’ an analyst said The Solomon Islands has awarded a multimillion-dollar contract to a Chinese state company to upgrade an international port in Honiara in a project funded by the Asian Development Bank, a Solomon Islands official said yesterday. China Civil Engineering Construction Co (CCECC) was the only company to submit a bid in the competitive tender, Solomon Islands Ministry of Infrastructure Development official Mike Qaqara said. “This will be upgrading the old international port in Honiara and two domestic wharves in the provinces,” Qaqara said. Responding to concerns that the port could be deepened for Chinese naval access, he said there would be “no expansion.” The Solomon
Seven stories above a shop floor hawking cheap perfume and nylon underwear, Thailand’s “shopping mall gorilla” sits alone in a cage — her home for 30 years despite a reignited row over her captivity. Activists around the world have long campaigned for the primate to be moved from Pata Zoo, on top of a Bangkok mall, with singer Cher and actor Gillian Anderson adding their voices in 2020. However, the family who owns Bua Noi — whose name translates as “little lotus” — have resisted public and government pressure to relinquish the critically endangered animal. The gorilla has lived at Pata for more
RSS