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Science & Technology
Humans may speak a universal language, say scientists
2016-09-13
[Telegraph] 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.

"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 Dr Morten Christiansen, professor of psychology and director of Cornell's Cognitive Neuroscience Lab in the US where the study was carried out.

"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 study found, that in most languages, the word for ’nose’ is likely to include the sounds ’neh’ or the ’oo’ sound, as in ’ooze.’
Posted by:Besoeker

#8  Yeah the language is 'Sex'.

Next question?
Posted by: CrazyFool   2016-09-13 19:25  

#7  "Excuse me, I speak Jive"
Posted by: Frank G   2016-09-13 19:11  

#6  Yeah, linguists.
When my dogs(dachsund, shar-pei, labs) bark, they sound the same. Must be the American kennels, eh?
Posted by: Skidmark   2016-09-13 10:15  

#5  Does Director Christiansen include languages outside the major lingustic families, languages like Piraha, spoken only by an isolated tribe in the Amazonian jungle, described as:

Unrelated to any other extant tongue, and based on just eight consonants and three vowels, Pirahã has one of the simplest sound systems known. Yet it possesses such a complex array of tones, stresses, and syllable lengths that its speakers can dispense with their vowels and consonants altogether and sing, hum, or whistle conversations.

...The Pirahã, Everett wrote, have no numbers, no fixed color terms, no perfect tense, no deep memory, no tradition of art or drawing, and no words for “all,” “each,” “every,” “most,” or “few”—terms of quantification believed by some linguists to be among the common building blocks of human cognition. Everett’s most explosive claim, however, was that Pirahã displays no evidence of recursion, a linguistic operation that consists of inserting one phrase inside another of the same type, as when a speaker combines discrete thoughts (“the man is walking down the street,” “the man is wearing a top hat”) into a single sentence (“The man who is wearing a top hat is walking down the street”). Noam Chomsky, the influential linguistic theorist, has recently revised his theory of universal grammar, arguing that recursion is the cornerstone of all languages, and is possible because of a uniquely human cognitive ability.

Contrariwise, what Procopius2k said.
Posted by: trailing wife   2016-09-13 10:09  

#4  "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."

You know Sherlock, if you walk to the next building or across the commons, there's an office with title like anthropology department. They have this theory about an African diaspora in where hunter gathers migrated (before a wall could be built) out of the continent to populate the world. That would imply all the basics and knowledge needed by hunter gathers and a language to communicate them. Given the population wasn't yet even near millions*, we can speculate that their vocabulary wasn't either.

*See - Population Bottleneck.
Posted by: Procopius2k   2016-09-13 09:41  

#3  Golly so the Tower of Babel 8sn'the just some cool story in the end?

Whoda thunk it?
Posted by: Flusing Platypus6789   2016-09-13 07:13  

#2  A barking chien, eh?
Posted by: g(r)omgoru   2016-09-13 06:54  

#1  Many words have onomatopoeic roots. Hardly surprising they are similar in different languages.
Posted by: phil_b   2016-09-13 04:54  

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