3 ms·
The reason I thought ca-chook meant small is because it's fairly difficult to say. When saying small vs big, there's a few incentives (physical, contextual, etc
by jack9 11y ago
The reason I thought ca-chook meant small is because it's fairly difficult to say. When saying small vs big, there's a few incentives (physical, contextual, etc) to have one easier to say than another.
e.g. We have a big problem. We have a small problem.
- danblick 11y agoI thought küçük ("coo-chook") sounded small because it reminded me of baby cooing. I'm not really surprised by this result. Some words are imitative. Probably words that are more imitative are evolutionarily selected to remain in human languages because their speakers find them easier to recall. To me that seems like a perfectly good explanation for the phenomena that has little to do with "hardwiring into our brains".