In many languages of the world, the "red" and "round" adjectives contain the letter "r", while the word for "nose" contains the "n". It is a surprising fact: so far it has always pensato0 it was completely arbitrary and random that a certain word is associated with certain sounds.
According to a study that analyzed thousands of the world's existing languages it seems however that
it is not just that: whatever the kinship of languages and geographic locations in which they are spoken, it is more likely that the words that indicate certain meanings contain some sounds than others .
TO EACH HIS WORD SOUND. These repetitive patterns and associations, to which scientists can not give an explanation, have emerged from the analysis made by an international group of researchers of a hundred terms in common use, from those who identify the body parts to colors to natural phenomena in 3,700 languages, about two-thirds of those spoken on the planet.
Rather than showing a random pattern, as expected, it turned out that the sounds associated with certain words seem to repeat consistently. So, to name a few, "leaf" very often includes "l", "b" or "p", while in terms indicating "small" is the "i."
The sound-meaning statistical correlation has been particularly strong in the designation of parts of the body ("language", for example, almost always contains the "l"), for pronouns, verbs of motion, names of objects and phenomena of nature, such as " star "," fish "," storm. "
WHERE'S THE CONNECTION? Researchers do not know how to explain the reason for this correspondence between sounds and words, which contradicts one of the fundamental principles of linguistics. Morten Christiansen, director of the Cornell Cognitive Neuroscience Lab and author of the study, however, points out that this particular concerns important words in the vocabulary of everyday life, learned early in life. Could it have to do with the way in which our brain processes language. Surely it is a key question for future research about how he was born and evolved human language.
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