Posted on 09/13/2016 6:57:08 AM PDT by BenLurkin
"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."
...
"It doesn't mean all words have these sounds, but the relationship is much stronger than we'd expect by chance," added Dr Christiansen.
Other words found to contain similar sounds across thousands of languages include bite, dog, fish, skin, star and water. The associations were particularly strong for words that described body parts, like knee, bone and breasts.
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.
(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...
Universal language? How about ENGLISH?
Yes, it is called “Money” or “Cold Hard Flipping Cash” (whatever that cash maybe)
English? I thought it was Esparanto.
Indeed, that is the language spoken by Adam and Eve.
This would support the story of Genesis chapter 11 regarding the incident at the Tower of Babel and its aftermath.
Might it be a holdover from our pre-Babel days - the time before Democrats? :)
Esparanto? How about Eubonics?
Some people claim that communication prior to the fall of the tower was telepathic, i.e. that that is what the story of the tower means. That might explain the thing about the woman being able to communicate with a snake...
Words for “water” and “mother” seem to be close across languages, but I don’t see how “dog” makes that category.
The democrats and neocons, are trying to usher in a new tower of Babel with their multiculturalism push.
Augustine thought that Hebrew was the first language (basing that on the idea that the descendants of Heber still spoke his language, after Babel).
Saw this elsewhere, and wondered if linguists had somehow forgotten about root languages. The modern languages spoken by a wide swath of the globe derive from just a few origin points, and those points are fairly close to each other, enabling a lot of borrowing and cross-pollination of phonemes.
And their contention that “I” and “You” not containing certain letter sounds is contradicted so many ways. In Latin (recent root for much of Europe), “I” is “sui”, which has two of the letter sounds they say don’t get used, and many Latin verbs use “o” to denote the first-person singular. In Hindi, “I” is “mu”. Ditto for “You”, which is “tu” in Latin and Hindi, and all three use “u”, and English also has “o”, and Latin and Hindi share “t”.
Try Manderin the same word Yanjing (sp) can means eyes, eye glasses or penis depending on pronunciation.
” ‘You’ is unlikely to include sounds involving u, o, p, t, d, q, s, r and l.”
Like “yOU” in English?
Next stupid theory.
in nearly every language the word for mother is ma and that can be attributed to the fact that it is one of the earliest sounds a baby can make repeatedly and thus associate with their care giver.
Similarly pa or ba is associated with the child’s father. It comes later in mouth muscle coordination.
O or oh is very commonly used across cultures to express surprise. Even some animals mimic this when surprised or scared.
From the article: “You is unlikely to include sounds involving u, o, p, t, d, q, s, r and l.”
You is pronounced ‘u’
“U” is the first letter they say is an unlikely sound to be used for “you”
I wonder if that’s a typo?
that soured me as well since outside your examples in Japanese the equivalent ‘anata’ has a strong ‘t’ sound as well.
I don’t buy that. There’s nothing from the text to suggest this and there’s no what to know what the serpent looked or sounded like before it was cursed by God. But that’s just my two cents.
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