yours similary, language.

I was watching the movie “train to Busan” the other day. It’s a Japanese movie so I was watching it with subtitles. I couldn’t help but notice that the daughter of the protagonist was calling her father “appa”. I was taken aback because “appa” is the word for father in Tamil (a south Indian language). How could it be that two words have the same meaning in two different languages of countries thousands of miles apart? To my knowledge, India and Japan don’t even have any history in terms of wars. Then I found this.

The word for mother in many languages starts with the letter “M”. So the question is, do all languages a common ancestor? How many languages have actually been invented and how many are just a result of plagiarism?

 When I searched the reason for “M” being the starting letter for “Mother” in different languages I found this.

“The sound "mm" is one of the first sounds a baby makes while trying to speak, along with sounds of p, b, d, and t. Since the mother is the primary caregiver when a baby starts to speak, she is encouraged by the mother, and being boosted, a baby starts to make that sound more often, and identifies the primary caregiver with that 'mm' sound.”

That seemed like a reasonable explanation and if you have read my previous article on “free will” you would know that we are not very free to invent languages. The reason why many things have the same word or similar word in different languages could be that we humans while giving a name to something think about how could we relate this sound with that object and as a result most humans would come up with similar sounding words in different languages. Now, obviously, it’s not true for each and every object or feeling we have because then there would be only one language. But the majority of such words cannot be ignored.

In a psychology experiment when people were asked to name the figures shown above as “Maluma” or “Takete” the vast majority of them associated “maluma” with the figure on the right and “Takete” with the figure on the left. And when asked the reason for the same they said “it just felt right” or “the words conveyed the nature of the figures somehow”. The word “Maluma” conveys smoothness whereas the word “Takete” conveys something pointy or with sharp edges. An interesting question here would be that, are the feelings that these people have the result of our social lives giving us the same intuition when it comes to naming these figures or are the feelings intrinsic and biological in nature. The former would mean that the experiment is not giving any useful information. However, the later would give rise to interesting possibilities.

Many people are emotionally attached to their mother tongue. Although I can sympathize with their thought process this actually makes it harder for people to choose a lingua franca. The importance of a language is only determined by the no of people that speak it and also other parameters like easiness in learning. The reason why English is being used so widely across the globe is that it was spread across the globe because of the colonial rule and thus makes a perfect candidate for a lingua franca. Another interesting question is, how would we communicate when we encounter alien species that are intelligent enough and at the same time gentle enough to not eat us? These are questions yet to be answered. 

 - Ajet