How likely are chance resemblances between languages? (2002)
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Re: How likely are chance resemblances between languages? (2002)
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Re: How likely are chance resemblances between languages? (2002)
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Re: How likely are chance resemblances between languages? (2002)
#4I remember some anecdote of an Australian language, where the word for "dog" was pronounced more or less as in English, just "dog". At some point it was proven that the English word could not have possibly been transmitted to those people, it was just some sequence of phonemes that had been arbitrarily assigned to label the animal. I can't find a good link for this.
Given enough languages spoken by enough people, seems inevitable that at least a few words will be coincidentally the same. Kodos and Kang, on the other hand...
Re: How likely are chance resemblances between languages? (2002)
#5Finnish and Japanese are fairly similar but weirdly completely unrelated iirc.
Re: How likely are chance resemblances between languages? (2002)
#6I remember some anecdote of an Australian language, where the word for "dog" was pronounced more or less as in English, just "dog". At some point it was proven that the English word could not have possibly been transmitted to those people, it was just some sequence of phonemes that had been arbitrarily assigned to label the animal. I can't find a good link for this. Given enough languages spoken by enough people, see…
It's probably Mbabaram.
> When Dixon finally managed to meet Bennett, he began his study of the language by eliciting a few basic nouns; among the first of these was the word for "dog". Bennett supplied the Mbabaram translation, dog. Dixon suspected that Bennett had not understood the question, or that Bennett's knowledge of Mbabaram had been tainted by decades of using English. But it turned out that the Mbabaram word for "dog" was in fact dúg,[2] pronounced almost identically to the Australian English word (compare true cognates such as Yidiny gudaga, Dyirbal guda, Djabugay gurraa and Guugu Yimidhirr gudaa, for example[3]). The similarity is a complete coincidence [...].
Re: How likely are chance resemblances between languages? (2002)
#7I remember some anecdote of an Australian language, where the word for "dog" was pronounced more or less as in English, just "dog". At some point it was proven that the English word could not have possibly been transmitted to those people, it was just some sequence of phonemes that had been arbitrarily assigned to label the animal. I can't find a good link for this. Given enough languages spoken by enough people, see…
That's cool! I googled around and found that this must be the Mbabaram language, an extinct language once spoken in East Australia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mbabaram_language#Word_for_%22...
> The similarity is a complete coincidence: the English and Mbabaram languages developed on opposite sides of the planet over the course of tens of thousands of years. This and other false cognates have been cited by typological linguist Bernard Comrie as a caution against deciding that languages are related based on a small number of lexical comparisons.
Re: How likely are chance resemblances between languages? (2002)
#8Finnish and Japanese are fairly similar but weirdly completely unrelated iirc.
My favorite little coincidence is that ending a sentence in "ne" turns it into a question in both Japanese and colloquial German, with exactly the same sense ("isn't it?").
Re: How likely are chance resemblances between languages? (2002)
#9Finnish and Japanese are fairly similar but weirdly completely unrelated iirc.
My favorite little coincidence is that ending a sentence in "ne" turns it into a question in both Japanese and colloquial German, with exactly the same sense ("isn't it?").
A slight variation of that is even in colloquial English, with "no." As in "we should probably get going, no?"
Re: How likely are chance resemblances between languages? (2002)
#10Finnish and Japanese are fairly similar but weirdly completely unrelated iirc.
My favorite little coincidence is that ending a sentence in "ne" turns it into a question in both Japanese and colloquial German, with exactly the same sense ("isn't it?").
Trinidadian English: "ent?"
I think there's an innate human desire to modify the sentence to make it a question with as few additional sounds as possible.