As different as the world ’s words may seem to the untrained capitulum , some concepts partake in the same sounds even in languages that are completely unrelated , a new study find .
In a cogitation spot byAtlas Obscuraand put out inPNAS , a chemical group of European researchers find that across about two - thirds of world speech , certain words retain some of the same sounds — whether they ’re in Russian , Swahili , or French .
The research worker looked at word lean of about 100 canonic vocabulary concepts ( traverse thing like pronoun , figure of body percentage , verbs referring to motion , and noun that name born phenomenon ) , analyse them to vocalize law of similarity . Some of the concepts included in the database of more than 6000 language were descent , os , leaf , muckle , sun , ruby-red , and kill .
Words that describe the place of something , like “ little ” or “ full , ” showed peculiarly solid levelheaded relationships between languages . Good Book for “ small ” typically have the “ i ” phone , and for “ full , ” the “ p ” or “ b ” speech sound . “ around ” often has an “ gas constant ” in it .
organic structure parts also had strong relationships to certain sounds . Bible for “ tongue ” normally have an “ l ” or a “ uranium , ” and “ nozzle ” run to involve nasal “ n ” sounds . The baby’s room price for “ mother ” ( think “ mama ” ) tend to feature the “ m ” sound . One conjecture for the latter concept — which , across many different languages , is not just a similar - fathom terminal figure but the exact same Bible — is that “ mama ” and its variants are related to the “ oral cavity form of suckling babies or to the sounds feeding babies produce , ” according to the discipline .
While this study ca n’t differentiate us why exactly these words tend to partake in the same sounds no matter where in the world they come from , the researchers speculate it could be that “ the signals are due to factors common to our species , such as sound symbolisation , iconicity , communicative pressure , orsynesthesia . ” These common sound , they note , show some of the constraints on our power to communicate . “ Despite the immense tractableness of the world ’s voice communication , ” they write , “ some effectual - import association are favor by culturally , historically , and geographically diverse human groups . ”
[ h / tAtlas Obscura ]
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