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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 insta

by 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.
  - retrac 4y ago
    The pattern I'm talking about shows up across language families. Japanese, Tamil, Quecha, Latin -- are not known to be related but tend to Subject-Object-Verb. English, Chinese, Indonesian, Arabic, Igbo are all Subject-Verb-Object. None of these languages are in families known to be related (except English and Latin). Some 90% of languages in hundreds of unrelated language families are SVO or SOV in basic word order. Most of the remainder are VSO. Object first is extremely rare everywhere. It's a conjecture that, perhaps, all, or most, of the world's language families are related if you go far back enough, and that proto-World was SOV or SVO, but that has not been demonstrated. So there's no consensus on why these patterns have these tendencies. The sample size is quite large. There's several hundred documented, not-known-to-be-related language families, and language isolates, that must have been separated historically from each other for at least a couple thousand years (or their relation would be pretty obvious). It does look like the tendencies mentioned are retained for a long time in separate populations despite language change, for some reason. That it might be because it relates to how we think is speculation, admittedly. You can read more about the phenomenon here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_order#Distribution_of_word_order_types https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_order#Distribution_of_wor... It is a rather striking distribution, isn't it?
    - shakna 4y ago
      > It is a rather striking distribution, isn't it? No, not at all striking. [0] Merely a reflection from the older influences. Many, many languages that are not grouped in the same families, _are_ descended from PIE, and its children. That is to say, they may not traditional grouped in the same family, but would probably still be considered to be in the Indo-European family. For an example of this "same family" thing, Japanese, Tamil, Quecha, are all probably descended from Proto-Uralic [1], despite not traditionally being considered sister languages. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Indo-European_language#Syntax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Indo-European_language#S... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Uralic_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Uralic_language
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
- BbzzbB 4y ago
  My gripe is not that there is some convergent etymology, it's attributing it to genetics. I think a phycist would feel similarly if it was attributed to "human energy" or something like that. Sure almost all languages share consonants, but there are only so many sounds our mouths can make that has nothing surprising. Yet there are exceptions like Dahalo which is a language made of clicks. Sure there are similar words from different roots. Say in the 3 languages I speak, mom/maman/mama, dad/papa/tata, no/non/ne. But there's no reason to involve genetics. Some sounds are easier to make for babies/toddlers, it makes sense they would converge toward for universal words like parent appellations. Protein synthesis doesn't have to play a part in it no matter how magical genetics may seem.
  - retrac 4y ago
    I'm not sure why you think I attribute that to genetics? I was kind of making the same argument you were. It's just the obvious way to do it.
    - BbzzbB 4y ago
      Bit late to answer, so if you read this, sorry. I must've missed your last paragraph which makes it obvious we are thinking about it similarly. I latched onto genetics because it's why I got involved in the thread.

by BbzzbB 4y ago

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.
- retrac 4y ago
  The pattern I'm talking about shows up across language families. Japanese, Tamil, Quecha, Latin -- are not known to be related but tend to Subject-Object-Verb. English, Chinese, Indonesian, Arabic, Igbo are all Subject-Verb-Object. None of these languages are in families known to be related (except English and Latin). Some 90% of languages in hundreds of unrelated language families are SVO or SOV in basic word order. Most of the remainder are VSO. Object first is extremely rare everywhere. It's a conjecture that, perhaps, all, or most, of the world's language families are related if you go far back enough, and that proto-World was SOV or SVO, but that has not been demonstrated. So there's no consensus on why these patterns have these tendencies. The sample size is quite large. There's several hundred documented, not-known-to-be-related language families, and language isolates, that must have been separated historically from each other for at least a couple thousand years (or their relation would be pretty obvious). It does look like the tendencies mentioned are retained for a long time in separate populations despite language change, for some reason. That it might be because it relates to how we think is speculation, admittedly. You can read more about the phenomenon here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_order#Distribution_of_word_order_types https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_order#Distribution_of_wor... It is a rather striking distribution, isn't it?
  - shakna 4y ago
    > It is a rather striking distribution, isn't it? No, not at all striking. [0] Merely a reflection from the older influences. Many, many languages that are not grouped in the same families, _are_ descended from PIE, and its children. That is to say, they may not traditional grouped in the same family, but would probably still be considered to be in the Indo-European family. For an example of this "same family" thing, Japanese, Tamil, Quecha, are all probably descended from Proto-Uralic [1], despite not traditionally being considered sister languages. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Indo-European_language#Syntax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Indo-European_language#S... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Uralic_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Uralic_language
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
BbzzbB 4y ago
My gripe is not that there is some convergent etymology, it's attributing it to genetics. I think a phycist would feel similarly if it was attributed to "human energy" or something like that. Sure almost all languages share consonants, but there are only so many sounds our mouths can make that has nothing surprising. Yet there are exceptions like Dahalo which is a language made of clicks. Sure there are similar words from different roots. Say in the 3 languages I speak, mom/maman/mama, dad/papa/tata, no/non/ne. But there's no reason to involve genetics. Some sounds are easier to make for babies/toddlers, it makes sense they would converge toward for universal words like parent appellations. Protein synthesis doesn't have to play a part in it no matter how magical genetics may seem.
- retrac 4y ago
  I'm not sure why you think I attribute that to genetics? I was kind of making the same argument you were. It's just the obvious way to do it.
  - BbzzbB 4y ago
    Bit late to answer, so if you read this, sorry. I must've missed your last paragraph which makes it obvious we are thinking about it similarly. I latched onto genetics because it's why I got involved in the thread.