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How likely are chance resemblances between languages? (2002)
- velcrovan 3y ago[flagged]
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- NoMoreNicksLeft 3y agoI remember some anecdote of an Australian language, where the word for "dog" was pronounced more or less as in English, just "dog". At some point it was proven that the English word could not have possibly been transmitted to those people, it was just some sequence of phonemes that had been arbitrarily assigned to label the animal. I can't find a good link for this. Given enough languages spoken by enough people, seems inevitable that at least a few words will be coincidentally the same. Kodos and Kang, on the other hand...
- Tar90 3y agoIt's probably Mbabaram. > When Dixon finally managed to meet Bennett, he began his study of the language by eliciting a few basic nouns; among the first of these was the word for "dog". Bennett supplied the Mbabaram translation, dog. Dixon suspected that Bennett had not understood the question, or that Bennett's knowledge of Mbabaram had been tainted by decades of using English. But it turned out that the Mbabaram word for "dog" was in fact dúg,[2] pronounced almost identically to the Australian English word (compare true cognates such as Yidiny gudaga, Dyirbal guda, Djabugay gurraa and Guugu Yimidhirr gudaa, for example[3]). The similarity is a complete coincidence [...]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mbabaram_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mbabaram_language
- n4r9 3y agoThat's cool! I googled around and found that this must be the Mbabaram language, an extinct language once spoken in East Australia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mbabaram_language#Word_for_%22dog%22 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mbabaram_language#Word_for_%22... > The similarity is a complete coincidence: the English and Mbabaram languages developed on opposite sides of the planet over the course of tens of thousands of years. This and other false cognates have been cited by typological linguist Bernard Comrie as a caution against deciding that languages are related based on a small number of lexical comparisons.
- angiosperm 3y agoThe description of the Pleiades as "seven sisters" in Australia and Europe is a similar case. People used to think it meant the story had been carried so long, and so far. But 50,000 years seems to be too long. That said, it has been tens of millennia since a seventh star could be distinguished. People today count six, but it is described as seven most places. And, the story of the husband who visits the land of the dead and fails to retrieve his wife really was carried all the way to North America. That is probably "only" 15,000 years, from one of the later waves of migration.
- omnibrain 3y ago> the story of the husband who visits the land of the dead and fails to retrieve his wife In Europe that's Orpheus and Eurydice, do you have a pointer to the north american story and perhaps a source for the claim that it's really the same story (background)?
- angiosperm 3y agoCrecganford has a vid about it.
- __loam 3y agoFinnish and Japanese are fairly similar but weirdly completely unrelated iirc.
- TillE 3y agoMy favorite little coincidence is that ending a sentence in "ne" turns it into a question in both Japanese and colloquial German, with exactly the same sense ("isn't it?").
- metaxy2 3y agoA slight variation of that is even in colloquial English, with "no." As in "we should probably get going, no?"
- mbork_pl 3y agoAnd in Polish, where people often add a ", nie?" to the end of the sentence, with a similar result.
- bombela 3y agoAnd in french with "non ?" at the end. Often pronounced "nanh" (english), "nan" (french). A more familiar form of "non". On va prendre de l'essence d'abord, nan? We're going to get gas first, right?
- interestica 3y agoTrinidadian English: "ent?" I think there's an innate human desire to modify the sentence to make it a question with as few additional sounds as possible.
- _a_a_a_ 3y agoEnglish English: "innit?"
- angiosperm 3y agoYet, Ket in central Asia and Navajo in south-central North America are very closely related. Sadly, Ket is close to dead, with only dozens of mostly elderly still fluent. Some suspect it was carried in a migration from Alaska back to Asia. Languages used in British Columbia and Yukon are in the same family to those, but less similar. It is an example of a common phenomenon, where the extrema of a range retain older features. We see it also in far-west Celt and far-east Tocharian languages. It probably explains how rare genetic features are found in common in isolated South American, Australian, and Indian Ocean refugia, and nowhere between, and in pre-contact eastern US and western Europe haplogroups. Traces between get washed out by later influx.
- rafram 3y agoMay be related, not “are very closely related.” There are some cognates between the two families. But no two languages that were separated for 10,000 years are very closely related.
- angiosperm 3y agoThey share grammatical peculiarities lost in intermediate languages. Navajo introduced to Ket elders say they are almost inter-intelligible.
- mcswell 3y agoI have not heard that "inter-intelligible" claim, do you have a link/ citation for it?
- yongjik 3y agoI'll bet a keg of beer that they are not in fact mutually intelligible.
- batch12 3y agoNo dog in this fight, but I was nerd sniped into doing some googling. I guess this is what they're referencing: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Den%C3%A9%E2%80%93Yeniseian_languages https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Den%C3%A9%E2%80%93Yeniseian_...
- temporallobe 3y agoSlightly off-topic, but there are some food ethnicities that have interesting overlaps, such as Indian and Italian.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- userabchn 3y agoThe similarities between the Irish language and Middle Eastern languages was one of the reasons why people thought there had been a mass migration from the Middle East to Ireland, and I think this was at least partly what led British Israelites to dig up Ireland's sacred hill of Tara looking for the Ark of the Covenant. Genetic studies later confirmed that there had in fact been a mass migration from the Middle East to Ireland.
- treyd 3y agoAround when did this mass migration take place? Is there any reason posited as to why?
- samatman 3y agoThe migration wave you're referring to originated in Anatolia and spread across all of Europe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_European_Farmers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_European_Farmers In most places, including Ireland, they were displaced, with some assimilation, by the Yamnaya people. Most of the male lineages were extinguished, the genomic contribution from the previous wave is mainly through the female line. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yamnaya_culture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yamnaya_culture It was the Yamnaya who brought Indo-European languages to Europe, and Ireland. Resemblances between the Irish language and Semitic languages are coincidental.
- lastofthemojito 3y agoMy favorite little cross-language coincidence is how lots of place names up north end in 'vik'. In the old Viking world, there's Reykjavík, Keflavík, Grindavík, etc in Iceland. Then over in Norway, you've got Larvik, Malvik, Rørvik, etc. In Sweden: Västervik, Valdemarsvik, Örnsköldsvik. Then in the new world, Greenland has Aasivik and Arsivik. The Eastern part of the Canadian north has has Aquiatulavik and Iqiattavik and Akulivik. Up in the Northwest Territories there's Aklavik and Inuvik. Cross over into Alaska and you'll find Utqiagvik and Kaktovik. To make it even more interesting, on Russia's north coast you'll find a Nordvik. Surely there must have been a prehistoric super-culture up North that founded all of these places right? Not so - in Norse, that 'vik' meant cove, and as a seafaring culture they had a lot of settlements on coves. In Inuit and related languages 'vik' means place, so that ended up in a lot of names. Oh, and the Russian Nordvik was just given a Norwegian name. So no, there almost certainly wasn't extensive linguistic exchange between Vikings and indigenous people of North America. Although, since L'Anse aux Meadows (the one place Norse are known to have been in North America) means Meadows Cove, I think it should be renamed Meadowvik.
- greggsy 3y agoGiven that a cove is actually a place, it is reasonable to conclude that there is a connection between the use of this suffix as a descriptor for ‘place’ in both language groups. There may not have been ‘extensive linguistic exchange’ between Northern American and Northern Europeans, but there is evidence that contact had been made, and it’s not outside the realms of possibility that the vik suffix was transferred one way or the other during those encounters.
- ytdytvhxgydvhh 3y ago> Given that a cove is actually a place, it is reasonable to conclude that there is a connection between the use of this suffix as a descriptor for ‘place’ in both language groups. I’d say it’s reasonable to say that there could be a connection but it seems like quite a leap to conclude that there is a connection based on current knowledge.
- nicklecompte 3y ago
- akavi 3y agoI've always been amused by the fact that "chilly" in English is so similar to the synonymous "ಚಳಿ" (roughly "Chuh-ly") in Kannada (my family's mother tongue)
- xdavidliu 3y agomy favorite is how the word ant (the insect) is "mah-yi" in chinese, while the word aunt (the family member) is "ah-yi" in chinese. There's tonality differences as well, but I wonder what the probability of that is, and whether there are other examples in english / chinese
- bradrn 3y agoConsulting Wiktionary, it lists several words for ‘aunt’ in Mandarin: depending on the precise relation, it can be gūmǔ, bómǔ, shúmǔ, yímǔ, jiùmǔ, plus some other dialectal synonyms. None of these sound anything like ‘ah-yi’.
- gfaure 3y agoThis is clearly referring to 阿姨, which is a vocative term of address for an aunt (in particular, on the mother's side). https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E9%98%BF%E5%A7%A8 https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E9%98%BF%E5%A7%A8
- dang 3y agoOne single-comment mini-thread from a while back: How likely are chance resemblances between languages? (2002) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12335105 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12335105 - Aug 2016 (1 comment)
- User23 3y agoSounds like the Birthday Paradox, but instead of two people in the room sharing a birthday it’s just there exists some pair whose birthdays are within a week of each other.
- marc_abonce 3y ago> Zompist That's a name I haven't heard in a long, long time. This website has the best guide (afaik) on how to create a conlang[1]. Or at least it was the best guide back in the 2000's, probably something better has been written since but I've been out of touch with the conlang subculture for over a decade now so I have no idea anymore. https://www.zompist.com/kit.html https://www.zompist.com/kit.html
- bradrn 3y agoSomething better has indeed been written… that being his expanded print edition of the same guide [https://www.zompist.com/lckbook.html https://www.zompist.com/lckbook.html], plus the various other books on the subject he’s written. I don’t know of anything better for learning how to conlang, and even just for learning about linguistics it’s very good.