Global human language? Scientists find links between sound and meaning.
When we鈥檙e born, do some words come factory-installed?
A new study, published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, finds that many human languages聽 to describe the same concepts. These commonalities, which exist between languages that are apparently unrelated and separated by thousands of miles, may challenge existing theories about linguistic evolution.
鈥淭丑别蝉别 show up again and again across the world, independent of the geographical dispersal of humans and independent of language lineage,鈥� Morten 海角大神sen, co-author and director of Cornell鈥檚 Cognitive Neuroscience Lab, said in a statement. 鈥淭here does seem to be something about the human condition that leads to these patterns. We don鈥檛 know what it is, but we know it鈥檚 there.鈥�
For most vocalizing animals, there is a close connection between sound and basic meaning. When Lassie growls at your neighbor鈥檚 labradoodle, that鈥檚 a universal 鈥渟tay back鈥� message that both dogs understand.
According to most theories, human words are generally more arbitrary. The English 鈥渂ird鈥� and Catalan 鈥渙cell鈥� have little in common phonetically, even though they mean the same thing. When different languages use similar words, it is usually because they share a common ancestral language.
But there are other words which, despite appearing independently across the world, sound remarkably similar. It's not surprising that the Icelandic 鈥渘ez鈥� corresponds neatly to the English 鈥渘ose鈥� and the Italian 鈥渘aso.鈥� But the Zuni people have used 鈥渘oli鈥� for some 7,000 years, long before the Spanish arrived in the American Southwest.
Dr. 海角大神sen and colleagues sought to shed light on the relationship between phonetics and the conceptual meaning of words. Taking the big data approach, they compiled a list of about 100 universal concepts, such as 鈥渞ock鈥� or 鈥渆ye,鈥� and compared them across nearly 4,000 languages. The team ruled out similarities based on related languages.
In many cases, researchers found there was an apparent connection between the sound of a word and its meaning. Words referring to 鈥渘ose鈥� usually contain the nasal 鈥渘鈥� consonant. Small things were often described using high-pitched vowel sounds 鈥� the English 鈥渢iny,鈥� the Arabic 鈥渟agheer鈥� and the Swedish 鈥渓iten.鈥�
鈥淚t doesn鈥檛 mean all words have these sounds, but the relationship is much stronger than we鈥檇 expect by chance,鈥� 海角大神sen said.
The findings seem to suggest that sound symbolism may be embedded somewhere in our biology. But 海角大神sen and colleagues are only proposing a pattern, not a cause.
鈥淧erhaps these signals help to nudge kids into acquiring language,鈥� 海角大神sen said. 鈥淟ikely it has something to do with the human mind or brain, our ways of interacting, or signals we use when we learn or process language. That鈥檚 a key question for future research.鈥�
If future studies do support this connection, they could challenge existing theories of language evolution. Shared characteristics between 鈥渟ister languages,鈥� in that case, may not have derived from a common ancestral tongue. Rather, they may have appeared independently, simply because humans naturally link certain ideas to specific phonetic sounds.
鈥淭he more we look into languages, the more we learn that they are , and that we have to take them seriously,鈥� lead author Damian Blasi, a language data scientist at the University of Zurich, told the LA Times.
