NAGARANGA

Astronomical Table with Vovelle, Worcester England Oxford (probably) / England (Place created), 14th century, shortly after 1386

See on Scoop.it - Knowmads, Infocology of the future

A first-of-its-kind study looking at more than 6,000 languages has found that people from around the world tend to use the same sounds to signify common objects and ideas. The findings suggest that humans speak a kind of ‘universal language’, perhaps influenced by biology, and go against a long-standing principle of modern linguistics – essentially, that there is no link between the sounds and the meaning of words. “These sound symbolic patterns show up again and again across the world, independent of the geographical dispersal of humans and independent of language lineage,” says cognitive psychologist Morten H. Christiansen from 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.” Christiansen’s international team – including physicists, linguists, and computer scientists – conducted a massive analysis of almost two-thirds (62 percent) of the languages in use around the globe today. Their investigation focused on basic vocabulary in each of these tongues, looking at the words used to describe up to 100 of the most common concepts people everywhere address every day: “dog”, “ear”, “water”, “tooth”, “you”, and so on. They found a strong statistical relationship (74 sound–meaning associations) between the common concepts and the vocal sounds people make when referring to them. In other words, despite the fact that foreign languages can sound totally confusing if you don’t understand them, there are actually a lot of similarities if you look closely – at least for the most common words, such as pronouns, body parts, properties (“small”, “full”) and verbs.

marinni.livejournal.com