New discoveries about common ground between languages ​​in the world

About 60% of the world's languages ​​have similar pronunciation and character usage in many common words.

The study, published Sept. 12 in the Journal of the National Academy of Sciences, rejects a long-standing perspective that among different languages, there is no similarity in the sound of a word and its meaning. from that.

Through research, Morten Christiansen, a psychologist at Cornell University, said that different languages ​​in the world have a similarity in using the sound of a word and this relationship goes far beyond those impact as population distribution or language origin.

This similarity has an effect on human factors.

Mr. Christiansen said that this similarity has an impact from human factors , but now scientists need to study further before making specific conclusions.

The study analyzed 100 basic vocabulary of about 6,000 languages ​​in the world. The results show that a significant portion of these words in different languages ​​have similar pronunciation and word meanings.

Specifically, in most languages, the word describing "nose" usually includes the "n" or "u" sound . The word "tongue" often comes with the "l" sound, the word "sand" (English "sand" ) is more likely to include the "s" sound while the "r" sound often appears in words like "red " (English is " red " ) or " round " (English is" round " ).

For example, the word "club" in English is "club" , Russian also has the same pronunciation and pronunciation. The incidence does not appear absolute but often enough to refute the random hypothesis. This relationship is strongest in the group of descriptions of body parts.

The study is a collaboration between the University of Zurich, University of Leiden, the Institute of Human History Science Max Planck and Leipzig University.