The research, shattered the cornerstone concept in linguistics and demonstrated a robust statistical relationship between certain basic concepts– from body parts to familial relationships and aspects of the natural world– and the sounds humans around the world use to describe them, researchers said.
“These sound symbolic patterns show up again and again across the world, independent of the geographical dispersal of humans and independent of language lineage,” said Professor and Cognitive scientist Morten H. Christiansen, of Cornell University in New York, US.
“There does seem to be something about the human condition that leads to these patterns. We do not know what it is, but we know it’s there,” Christiansen added. For example, in most languages, the word for ‘nose’ is likely to include the sounds ‘neh’ or the ‘oo’ sound, as in ‘ooze’; for ‘tongue’ an ‘l’ (as in “langue” in French). Similarly ‘leaf’ would include the sounds ‘b’, ‘p’ or ‘l’; ‘sand’ uses the sound ‘s’, also words for ‘red’ and ‘round’ would include the ‘r’ sound. “It doesn’t mean all words have these sounds, but the relationship is much stronger than we’d expect by chance,” Christiansen said.
The associations were particularly strong for words that described body parts. The team also found certain words are likely to avoid certain sounds. This was especially true for pronouns. For example, words for ‘I’ are unlikely to include sounds involving u, p, b, t, s, r and l. For the study, an international team of physicists, linguists and computer scientists from Argentina, Germany, the Netherlands and Switzerland analysed 40-100 basic vocabulary words in 62 per cent of the world’s more than 6,000 current languages and 85 per cent of its linguistic lineages.
The words included pronouns, body parts and properties, verbs that describe motion and nouns that describe natural phenomena (star, fish). They found a considerable proportion of the 100 basic vocabulary words have a strong association with specific kinds of human speech sounds.