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That's quite the click bait, given that the article then goes on to count words that don't even remotely sound like "huh", like "eh" or "a", just so they can cl
by TheRealPomax 6y ago
That's quite the click bait, given that the article then goes on to count words that don't even remotely sound like "huh", like "eh" or "a", just so they can claim it exists in every language. That's just straight up "not doing linguistics".
- yellowapple 6y agoSay all three of those words out loud. Do you really think they "don't even remotely sound like" each other? That they can't possibly have come from a common ancestor word that's been morphed over thousands of years? They sure sound similar and quite possibly related to me.
- TheRealPomax 6y agoAs someone who speaks five languages and took quite a number of linguistics courses: they don't sound the same at all if you pronounce them the way they're pronounced in their respective languages. And no, the further back in time you go, the likelihood of single ancestors giving rise to multiple descendants drops dramatically, and instead the likelihood of distinct roots giving rise to words that temporarily (because languages constantly change) sound the same skyrockets. That might sound counter intuitive, until you remember that languages, like people, don't actually have a family tree. They have a family graph. For cataloging and quick classification purposes we pretend languages can be classified in trees, but the actual relations between languages both over time and in the moment, are highly connected, weighted graphs.