I read somewhere recently that "OK" is the most widely used expression accross languages. Not universal per se, but close enough.
this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2023
8 points (100.0% liked)
No Stupid Questions
35728 readers
1162 users here now
No such thing. Ask away!
!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.
If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.
Credits
Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!
The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
this is the product of globalization, more to come
"mhm" to signify you're still listening and following along seems pretty universal to me.
Not even that.
For example the Spanish will use "éeeh" and the Portuguese "áaah".
I've heard those described by a voice coach as "resting sounds" and from my observation they depend not just on the language one speaks but sometimes even on regional accent.
Same with "huh?"
That would fit the bill. I think that could be universal.
Hi! I'm a linguist, and this topic is one that comes up commonly.
The answer is no. There is no such thing as languages/words that are native to humans. You can have things that are widely shared (mama/papa based on baby-talk as an example), but seeing as language itself is not universal to humans, there is no such thing as a word that is universal.
Feel free to ask any questions if you're curious!
Haha I first read your "The answer is no" sentence and thought you were literally referring to the word "no". If anything would be universal or at least well understand, I would think "no" would be a likely candidate. Guess not!
How common are things like the bouba/kiki effect in linguistics? It seems there are some sounds that are based on something other than learned behavior, how much does this cause commonality in real language?
Hi! Sorry for the delay, took a break from social media.
It's often an effect of local convergent evolution, effectively.
Like if the group next to you has certain associations, well you're likely to have similar associations. It's also hard to verify some of that research due to the nature of how it's conducted.
No worries, thanks for the response!
Interesting answer, scanning through the Wikipedia article on kiki/bouba it makes sense that we don't really have solid evidence that it isn't a learned trait. It may be hard to get a population of people who developed language independently of all other humans ever and see if they maintain the strong correlation with naming kiki and bouba.
So I guess that brings up another question I have kinda wondered about. What is the most "isolated" spoken language on the planet? By that, I mean the language that evolved most independently of other spoken languages. Is there anything interesting that can be learned by comparing such a language to the European languages that are dominant among the global population?
Great question! Here's the thing though, the language had to come from somewhere right? The people had to come from somewhere.
The assumptions and associations that make up the basis of language are thousands of years old. Obviously languages change and societies change, but no one has ever protested about the "k" sound being too "harsh" or something, or at least not seriously.
Even an extremely isolated population would likely still be heavily influenced by whatever the parent language is.
Just to counter the "Mother" example, in Finnish the word is "äiti". One could argue "mamma" is also used, but in my opinion it's just Swedish influence and not really used in the Eastern parts.
The topic is very interesting however, and recently I've read about the theory of universal grammar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_grammar which is a theory roughly saying that every human has an innate biological understanding for certain rules of grammar - independent of upbringing, culture and the like. For example, every human language will distinguish between nouns and vowels and verbs. The concept is fascinating, but so is the criticism. You could argue that the whole idea is just unfalsifiable pseudoscience or post-hoc explanation for what has been observed.
Regarding the "mother" example: Most languages also feature words that describe "mother" but don't follow the pattern (e.g. "mother").
I meant the word that is used by babies/small children and in connection with babies/small children.
Does this apply to "äiti"? (Serious question, I have no idea of the Finnish language).
I always figured it's because it's one of the first sounds a baby can consciously make.
Universal grammar sounds very interesting, and the criticism is a well. But yeah, it's kinda hard to falsify this.
On the other hand, these basic elements that universal grammar identifies seem to me (=>not a linguist) like something you can't do without. I wouldn't know what a language would do e.g. without a noun/verb separation. There are things and there are actions, which are two fundamentally different concepts. Makes sense that this separation exists in every language.
I don't know if Finnish kids say "m"-words for their mother, even when small. My kids used to say something like "mama" (or rather "mämä" where "ä" is like "a" in "apple") to mean basically "I want" and pointing at everything. Very hard to say.
I wouldn’t know what a language would do e.g. without a noun/verb separation. There are things and there are actions, which are two fundamentally different concepts. Makes sense that this separation exists in every language.
I was thinking about this, and a plausible scenario I came up with would be very simple language, where you would only use nouns in a simple setting. Like "food, mouth" would mean eating, "food, storage" would mean store the food etc. You certainly couldn't build very complex discussions, but some information could be passed. But it's just a layman's thought experiment, for whatever it's worth.
Funny enough, in Russian side Karelian they call mother "muamo".
Äiti is a loan word from Gothic "aiþei", which is quite interesting as such words aren't usually loaned to replace the original. The original Finnish word for mother is "emä", but this is not used about humans anymore.
Interesting, didn't know that!
How is universal grammar not falsifiable? Wouldn't there just have to be one human, natural language that doesn't follow the presumed rules to falsify?
I think you have to dive deeper into the sources of the article to fully understand that :)
My guess is that the UG is vague enough to allow this criticism. Maybe it doesn't define the rules well enough, or they are left too general to accommodate for every known language.
Well, in Georgian language "mama" is the word for father and "deda" is the word for mother so.
As to the actual exoressive words that are not about items then no, I don't believe there's any "universal words" - some words kinda became "natural" for many cultures like "ok", "'alo" (when answering a call). Yet Turkish for "ok" is "tamam" and older folks might not understand "ok". In my experience even sounds are not quite the same across the globe.
Overall I think there's definitely a way to universally express basic needs and feelings like anger, sadness, confusion, etc. with sounds and expressions combined - people might not get the cause but they'll get the point.
P. S. On the second thought - crying is quite universal, yeah.
There is reason to believe that there is some fairly universal mapping of sounds to meanings, even if the sounds are made-up nonesense: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouba/kiki_effect
I'm far from any kind of authority on this, but I think you'll find the similarities in language (like ma mama mom mum mother mummy) come from the fact that very many languages today stem from the same root languages.
What I find far more interesting is where they diverge.
Ananas Anana Aнана́с Ananass Nanas Mananasi
... In English?
Pineapple...
Wtf!
Edit: I've just remembered reading that "mama" and "papa" come from the sounds that babies make naturally...
https://www.babbel.com/en/magazine/why-does-mother-sound-the-same-in-so-many-languages
In the 13th century, Frederick II was the Holy Roman Emperor. He supposedly carried out a famous language deprivation experiment where he had infants raised by foster mothers who were not allowed to talk to them--they could only feed and bathe then. This was to see if there is a natural human language, he thought Greek or Hebrew might emerge. It turns out that the children all died. In sociology this is taught as proof that humans need language and social interaction to survive. But the whole story comes from a single Franciscan monk who was apparently not a fan of the emperor, so there's some doubt.
I would put some doubt on that story, since most children that were born deaf still survive.
You're thinking critically, which is good. But your bias is showing.
need language and social interaction to survive
Being deaf does not preclude one from gaining language or interacting socially.
If that story is true, there was no communication with these children. But children born deaf still learn to communicate via sign language or other motions. The language becomes non-spoken, but is visual and very rich and expressive.
Most people in the world understand what "fuck off" means
Waving to say Hi or Hello seems to be close enough to universal at this point. It's not completely universal, since there are some cultures, like the Sentinelese that might be isolated enough that they would not understand what it means, but for the most part, you can go most places in the world, wave at someone, and reasonably expect it to be interpreted as a greeting (whether greeting a stranger is appropriate in the culture is another thing entirely).
Various noises are also fairly universal, since humans mostly make the same kinds of noises. A sneeze may vary slightly in how it is written out, but it's near-universal in its interpretation (if you're a human). Same for a scream.
There is not a single word that's universal to all languages.
-
Even if there had ever been one at some point, there are languages that have/had word retirement as part of the culture speaking it: If a word is used as someone's name and that person dies, that word is now taboo and a new word is needed to refer to what the old word stood for.
-
Conlanging, especially by laypeople, often explicitly makes up most or all of its vocabulary from scratch or uses cyphers to make the connection invisible. I wouldn't be surprised if a people made up their own secret language from scratch, maybe initially with very similar grammar, that developed into a native language for a community.
-
Have you heard of Cockney rhyming slang? Take a word like "fart", use a two part word that rhymes with it, like "raspberry tart", then drop the rhyming part. That leaves you with "raspberry" meaning "fart" and no discernible connection to the old words this utterance/meaning pair came from.
-
Sign languages are languages as well, and in multiple instances developed from the ground up without influence from the surrounding spoken languages.
Have you heard of Cockney rhyming slang? Take a word like "fart", use a two part word that rhymes with it, like "raspberry tart", then drop the rhyming part. That leaves you with "raspberry" meaning "fart" and no discernible connection to the old words this utterance/meaning pair came from.
So that's where "blowing raspberries" came from? Pretty neat.
view more: next ›