Информационно-туристический интернет-портал «OPEN.KG» / Scientists: All Languages of the World Have Common Roots

Scientists: All Languages of the World Have Common Roots

Scientists: all languages of the world have common roots

Linguists from the USA and Britain compared the meanings of the most basic and simple words in 80 languages around the world and found that they all share a common semantics, indicating shared roots of speech among all humanity.


Linguists analyzed how similar and different words with similar meanings vary across eighty languages and concluded that the similarities in the semantic structure of these terms suggest common roots of speech among all humanity, reports RIA Novosti, citing the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“Before conducting this research, we knew almost nothing about how to measure the closeness of different conceptual ideas in various languages in a semantic sense. For example, we wondered how close 'Moon' and 'Sun' are to each other, considering that both are bright points in the sky. Or, for instance, the sea and sand, given their physical proximity. We questioned how we could measure this,” says Tanmoy Bhattacharya from the Santa Fe Institute (USA).

Bhattacharya and his colleagues, in cooperation with programmers and mathematicians from the University of Oxford, developed a methodology that allows them to answer these questions and assess the closeness of the meanings that speakers of different languages attribute to related or distant words, using a very simple approach.

In fact, their methodology resembles the famous idea of "Chinese whispers" — it exploits the problems of meaning transmission that inevitably arise when translating text from one language to another through a "chain" of translators who literally translate the text they receive.

According to this methodology, the scientists first took several words that they believed were close in meaning, then translated them into one of 80 randomly selected languages, and then translated them again, using all the meanings that those words had. The sets of meanings were then compared, allowing the scientists to determine how different languages differ from each other and how closely related they are.

The words chosen were extremely simple and basic — names of various natural objects, celestial bodies, times of day, forms of relief, and other things that our distant ancestors might have dealt with.

The analysis of the "networks" of such semantic meanings of related words showed that in all languages of the world, there are three distinct semantic "clusters." The first contains words describing phenomena related to water; the second — words denoting mountains or solid bodies; the third — various forms of relief, time, and celestial bodies.

An example of this is that words like "salt" and "sea" are significantly closer to each other in all languages than either is to the word "Sun," which is evident even in dialects spoken by people living far from seas and oceans.
The existence of these "clusters," according to Bhattacharya and his colleagues, suggests that the languages of all peoples of the world likely originate from a common root. This idea, the scientists acknowledge, may seem trivial to the layperson; however, linguists and archaeologists still lack clear understanding of when our ancestors acquired the gift of speech and whether this occurred in just one population of ancient humans or simultaneously in several of their groups.

The discovery of universal semantic "clusters," the scientists believe, will help answer this question and utilize the languages of the world's peoples to study the most ancient and nearly inaccessible eras in human history, about which we know almost nothing.
13-03-2018, 01:18
Вернуться назад