5 ms·

Hard disagree. Seems obvious to me those associations are cultural and extrapolations of previous experiences and stories. Ask these 3 prompts to isolated North

by BbzzbB 4y ago

Hard disagree. Seems obvious to me those associations are cultural and extrapolations of previous experiences and stories. Ask these 3 prompts to isolated North Koreans or Papuans (probably after explaining elves are supernatural humanoids from Germanic folklore associated with woods and pointy ears) and I'd bet the house it's gonna be a random distribution. Involving genetics and evolution in etymology makes no sense.

KennyBlanken 4y ago
Yeah, this is pretty silly. Following and recognizing phonetic patterns from science / fantasy fiction naming tropes isn't a "secret language." Ask a person off the street to come up with an "alien planet in a science fiction TV series" or "deadly gas/virus from a comic book" and you'll get similar answers. Your average person on the street could probably successfully come up with trope-fitting "evil alien species" and "peaceful alien species" names, too.
- notahacker 4y ago
  And if you asked the average person off a street somewhere with minimal exposure to English and Anglo-American culture to come up with names, and they'd probably come up with something completely different derived from their own cultural tropes and neighbouring foreign languages.
Sophistifunk 4y ago
The fact that the baabaa/keekee effect is not cultural is very well documented.
- aformerex 4y ago
  I think the above reply is more along the lines of - if you get into more complex concepts the idea breaks down. I love doing the bouba/kiki to ppl who know nothing of it. So far none of the "test" have given anything different that what the studies show.
  - BbzzbB 4y ago
    Keekee has sharp consonants and bouba has soft ones regardless of culture indeed. We're in the pattern matching realm, not genetics. Besides, here is one instance where they failed to reproduce this result in Papua New Guinea. https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1976-12107-001 https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1976-12107-001
    - retrac 4y ago
      With comparative linguistics, almost everything has an exception. But when perhaps 90% or more of languages do it a certain way on every continent, one does wonder if our thinking tends a certain way. General word order is another an example like that. The indirect object, or patient, or similar category usually is not the first word in a phrase or sentence. "The dog I see" for "I see the dog". "The money him the programmer gave." Like Yoda's species. Only 1 - 2% of languages do it that way consistently, and usually for recent grammatical development reasons, not a long-preserved feature. Similar story in phonetics. Nearly all languages have at least three stop consonants, usually p, t, k. Closing against the lips, teeth and back of the mouth in the (perhaps obvious?) positions in the mouth to make stop consonants. A few languages only have two of these positions. Some have four or even five, using the throat and using the palate, too. But >95% of them, all over the place, have at least the p, t, k stops. We aren't hardwired, I suspect, with that particular set of noises like we are with crying as a baby. You have to learn them all. It is cultural. Yet almost every culture has converged on at least a somewhat-similar subset. And a few have not. There are multiple ways to interpret such results, but I lean to something like convergent and parallel cultural evolution.
      - shakna 4y ago
        > There are multiple ways to interpret such results, but I lean to something like convergent and parallel cultural evolution. So far as I'm aware, that's a very fringe idea in linguistics, and pretty firmly rejected, despite many investigations. Rather, what you're seeing is propogation from older language influences. Things like Proto-Indo-European have very, very widespread influence - but are still very much not universal.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

by BbzzbB 4y ago

KennyBlanken 4y ago

Yeah, this is pretty silly. Following and recognizing phonetic patterns from science / fantasy fiction naming tropes isn't a "secret language." Ask a person off the street to come up with an "alien planet in a science fiction TV series" or "deadly gas/virus from a comic book" and you'll get similar answers. Your average person on the street could probably successfully come up with trope-fitting "evil alien species" and "peaceful alien species" names, too.

notahacker 4y ago
And if you asked the average person off a street somewhere with minimal exposure to English and Anglo-American culture to come up with names, and they'd probably come up with something completely different derived from their own cultural tropes and neighbouring foreign languages.

Sophistifunk 4y ago

The fact that the baabaa/keekee effect is not cultural is very well documented.

aformerex 4y ago
I think the above reply is more along the lines of - if you get into more complex concepts the idea breaks down. I love doing the bouba/kiki to ppl who know nothing of it. So far none of the "test" have given anything different that what the studies show.
- BbzzbB 4y ago
  Keekee has sharp consonants and bouba has soft ones regardless of culture indeed. We're in the pattern matching realm, not genetics. Besides, here is one instance where they failed to reproduce this result in Papua New Guinea. https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1976-12107-001 https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1976-12107-001
  - retrac 4y ago
    With comparative linguistics, almost everything has an exception. But when perhaps 90% or more of languages do it a certain way on every continent, one does wonder if our thinking tends a certain way. General word order is another an example like that. The indirect object, or patient, or similar category usually is not the first word in a phrase or sentence. "The dog I see" for "I see the dog". "The money him the programmer gave." Like Yoda's species. Only 1 - 2% of languages do it that way consistently, and usually for recent grammatical development reasons, not a long-preserved feature. Similar story in phonetics. Nearly all languages have at least three stop consonants, usually p, t, k. Closing against the lips, teeth and back of the mouth in the (perhaps obvious?) positions in the mouth to make stop consonants. A few languages only have two of these positions. Some have four or even five, using the throat and using the palate, too. But >95% of them, all over the place, have at least the p, t, k stops. We aren't hardwired, I suspect, with that particular set of noises like we are with crying as a baby. You have to learn them all. It is cultural. Yet almost every culture has converged on at least a somewhat-similar subset. And a few have not. There are multiple ways to interpret such results, but I lean to something like convergent and parallel cultural evolution.
    - shakna 4y ago
      > There are multiple ways to interpret such results, but I lean to something like convergent and parallel cultural evolution. So far as I'm aware, that's a very fringe idea in linguistics, and pretty firmly rejected, despite many investigations. Rather, what you're seeing is propogation from older language influences. Things like Proto-Indo-European have very, very widespread influence - but are still very much not universal.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]