Humans across the globe may be actually speaking the same language after scientists found that the sounds used to make the words of common objects and ideas are strikingly similar.

The discovery challenges the fundamental principles of linguistics, which state that languages grow up independently of each other, with no intrinsic meaning in the noises which form words.

But research which looked into several thousand languages showed that for basic concepts, such as body parts, family relationships or aspects of the natural world, there are common sounds - as if concepts that are important to the human experience somehow trigger universal verbalisations.</s>MIAMI: 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 Monday.

The study challenges a long-standing principle of linguistics, which holds that the relationship between sound and meaning is completely arbitrary, said the report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“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, 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 current 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,” said the study.

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.

“R” sounds were likely to 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.

More research is needed to understand why certain sounds are linked to certain words.

Co-authors on the study came from the University of Zurich, University of Leiden, Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, and University of Leipzig. AFP</s>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, said the report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“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, 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 Mr. Christiansen, director of Cornell’s Cognitive Neuroscience Lab.

For the study, scientists analysed dozens of basic vocabulary words in 62 per cent of the world’s more than 6,000 current languages.

Pronouns, body parts, animals, adjectives and verbs to describe motion were all included.

Strong association 

 

 Not all, but “a considerable proportion of the 100 basic vocabulary words have a strong association with specific kinds of human speech sounds,” said the study.

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. “R” sounds were likely to included in the words for “red” and “round.”</s>The variation between the thousands of languages spoken across the world would make you think that they have very little in common.

But a new study suggests otherwise.

An analysis of nearly two-thirds of the world's languages has shown humans tend to use the same sounds for common objects and ideas, no matter what language they are speaking.

The study, published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, looked at two thirds of the world's languages and found a pattern formed between the words used for certain basic concepts.

The 100 words in the study include things like nose, tongue, leaf and sand.

The researchers, from Cornell University in New York, say the study shatters a concept considered a cornerstone in linguistics - the century-old idea that the relationship between a sound of a word and its meaning is arbitrary.

In the past 20 years, language scientists have seen evidence suggesting that the rule is not necessarily iron-clad.

Researchers looked at two thirds of the world's languages and found a pattern formed between the words used for certain basic concepts. In most languages the word for 'nose' is likely to include the sounds 'neh' or the 'oo' sound, as in 'ooze’. The word for 'tongue' is likely to have 'l'. 'Leaf' is likely to include the sounds 'b,' 'p' or 'l’. And 'Sand' will probably use the sound 's’. The team also found certain words are likely to avoid certain sounds. This was especially true for pronouns. For example, words for 'I' are unlikely to include sounds involving u, p, b, t, s, r and l. 'You' is unlikely to include sounds involving u, o, p, t, d, q, s, r and l. The words included pronouns, body parts and properties like small and full, verbs that describe motion and nouns that describe natural phenomena like star and fish.

Some studies showed words for small objects in a variety of languages are likely to contain high-pitched sounds.

But until now, evidence had looked only at specific word/sound relationships or small sets of languages.

'People haven't been able to show whether sound symbolism is really something more pervasive throughout languages all over the world,' Professor Christiansen said.

'And this is the first time anyone has been able to show that at such a scale.'

Professor Christiansen looked at 40-100 basic vocabulary words in 62 per cent of the world's more than 6,000 current languages and 85 per cent of its linguistic lineages.

'These sound symbolic patterns show up again and again across the world, independent of the geographical dispersal of humans and independent of language lineage,' he said.

'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.'

The researchers say, for example, in most languages the word for 'nose' is likely to include the sounds 'neh' or the 'oo' sound, as in 'ooze.'

'It doesn't mean all words have these sounds, but the relationship is much stronger than we'd expect by chance,' Professor Christiansen said.

The associations were particularly strong for words that described body parts.

'We didn't quite expect that,' he said.

The team also found certain words are likely to avoid certain sounds.

This was especially true for pronouns.

For example, words for 'I' are unlikely to include sounds involving u, p, b, t, s, r and l. 'You' is unlikely to include sounds involving u, o, p, t, d, q, s, r and l.

The words included pronouns, body parts and properties like small and full, verbs that describe motion and nouns that describe natural phenomena like star and fish.

Why humans tend to use the same sounds across languages to describe basic objects and ideas is another question.

But Professor Christiansen thinks it could be related to the fact these concepts are important in all languages, and children are likely to learn these words early in life.

'Perhaps these signals help nudge kids into acquiring language,' he said.

'Likely 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.

They found a considerable proportion of the 100 basic vocabulary words have a strong association with specific kinds of human speech sounds.

The study's results are conservative; the actual number of sound symbolism patterns may in fact be even greater, Christiansen said.

'We wanted to show findings that we can really stand behind.'</s>Sifting through two-thirds of the world’s languages, scientists have discovered a strange pattern: 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.

If you look at basic words across unrelated languages from disparate parts of the world, you’ll typically find they sound nothing alike, the study authors point out. For example, “ptitsa,” “ndege” and “tori” all mean “bird” – in Russian, Swahili and Japanese, respectively.

“The idea that there is essentially no relation between sound and meaning has [existed for] over 100 years now,” said lead author Damian Blasi, a language data scientist at the University of Zurich in Switzerland and the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Germany. “And it strikes at something really intuitive.”

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.

“I think the reason why some of these ideas have a bad reputation is because people have proposed a lot of very sloppy theories,” Blasi said.

Certainly, you might find related words within a language that sound alike – think glance, glimmer and glare in English, which all have to do with vision and begin with a “gl.” But that doesn’t mean you’d find the same “gl-” cluster across other languages as well.

Still, Blasi and his colleagues realized there wasn’t a whole lot of data backing up this claim either way. But advancements in computing and modern statistical methods now mean that, instead of comparing a few — or a few dozen — languages, the scientists could do what generations of linguists before them could not: analyze 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. (For example, “snow,” while it’s a basic concept, is not shared, since many languages arose in places that never have any; but “rocks” are a ubiquitous feature of natural human habitats.)

Of course, plenty of 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.

The problem is, some researchers disagree about which languages are related, and how. So the scientists based their analyses on two different linguistic family trees, looking for patterns that were clear enough to survive under both models.

The researchers found, to their surprise, 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. These preferences weren’t universal – far from it – but they appeared over and over again.

Researchers are already fielding possible explanations for why these patterns crop up: perhaps “l” is associated with tongues and “n” is associated with noses because those body parts play a role in making those sounds, Blasi said. It might be that other associations are due to synesthesia — an ability to link perceptions from one sense to another (for example, seeing colors when hearing music).

But the scientists avoided trying to pin down explanations for the phenomena they observed.

“We don’t take any stance with respect to the origin,” Blasi said. “We just say, ‘What is the data saying? Is there any strong association, yes or no?’ Well, it seems that there is. Why? That’s a different question.”

It’s far too easy to come up with unfounded theories to explain such patterns, Blasi said. 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. People found a reasonable explanation every time – for a relationship that did not actually exist.

Instead, scientists may have to probe these preferences experimentally, Blasi said. Perhaps you could make up words for two different “alien” languages, and test people to see if they found it easier to remember words with the preferences found in this paper.

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. 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 calls into question some of the attempts that people have put forward in order to determine the prehistory of many linguistic families,” Blasi said.

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,” he said.

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Researchers from the Americas and Europe discover that sounds in 40–100 basic vocabulary words in around 3,700 languages are similar.