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The amateur linguist in me who, for example, finds it fascinating that Hindi and Farsi are far more closely related to European languages such as English or Greek than they are to other languages in that part of the world such as Arabic or Tamil, has come across an Ars Technica article that appears to demonstrate that there is a "language universal" that binds all language families:
Language takes an astonishing variety of forms across the world—to such a huge extent that a long-standing debate rages around the question of whether all languages have even a single property in common. Well, there's a new candidate for the elusive title of "language universal" according to a paper in this week's issue of PNAS[*]. All languages, the authors say, self-organise in such a way that related concepts stay as close together as possible within a sentence, making it easier to piece together the overall meaning.
Language universals are a big deal because they shed light on heavy questions about human cognition. The most famous proponent of the idea of language universals is Noam Chomsky, who suggested a "universal grammar" that underlies all languages. Finding a property that occurs in every single language would suggest that some element of language is genetically predetermined and perhaps that there is specific brain architecture dedicated to language.
The idea that all the major language families is nothing new, and linguists have documented similar words that seem to be present in different language families all over the globe (e.g., milk). This article may be more evidence of these links, or it may just demonstrate something in the language center of the brain that guarantees that all languages are going to have similar characteristics.
[*] Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
(Score: 2) by RedBear on Friday August 07 2015, @01:28PM
Congrats on missing the point that there is a word for "milk" in nearly every known human language, past and present. The implication was that this is a universal human cognitive concept that finds its way into our languages, not that the word is always "milk".
Yes, this is a facepalm moment. We all have them.
So, without even reading the article I'm guessing that the MIT announcement is about them finding an underlying statistical pattern in the distance between related words that is significant enough that it may help to decipher any human language, even those that have no known resemblance to any currently deciphered language. Which is kind of cool. Like finding a pattern that helps you eventually crack a cryptographic cipher. Except this pattern theoretically applies to any language humans ever have or ever will come up with. This sort of thing is like the Holy Grail in linguistics research.
If the statistical significance of the pattern holds up it will obviously imply some sort of mathematical principle which underlies and causes the pattern to form. The proceeding question will then be, will this pattern also be present in non-human languages that we encounter once we finally meet a few other sentient life forms?
¯\_ʕ◔.◔ʔ_/¯ LOL. I dunno. I'm just a bear.
... Peace out. Got bear stuff to do. 彡ʕ⌐■.■ʔ
(Score: 4, Touché) by Rich on Friday August 07 2015, @02:02PM
Obviously there has to be a word for "sun" as well, because it is awkward to describe it each time as: "the yellowish disc above us that is so bright that looking at it pains the eyes".
If at all, there might be a "compression" in force that causes common things to be shortened in form. E.g. "sun" probably is a very short word in many languages. As is milk, because people eventually figure out that they can drink that stuff from the cow and need to name it. Therefore, the inuit are said to have (didn't check) a massive number of words for "snow", describing every state they encounter in in. I could guess that there are equatorial african tribes whose native languages make it awkward to even describe the frozen state of water at all.
So it's less of a "universal root" for each of these than more of a "universal need to communicate about it". D'oh.