Headline October 10, 2016/ ''' *LANGUAGES* & RELATIONSHIPS '''

''' *LANGUAGES* &

 RELATIONSHIPS '''

*IN PROUD PAKISTAN*  -it matters not what you tune in to these days, there is always an  *audio/video ad*  smashing the ignorance and evil out of  illiteracy, darkness and poverty.

I stop  and thank  Prime Minister M Nawaz Sharif    and all the Chief Ministers, and all the other leaders and authorities who helped make this smart turn around kick off. 

*Ennobling Education*  would entail relentless work and focus in the years ahead, and the  World Students Society will avail every honour,  *in every country of the World, to plead, persuade and push for every effort*    in this great endeavor.  

!WOW!  makes no claims, but can discern the abstract. So, we thank profoundly the Leaders of the Developed World, Students, Professors, Teachers. Parents and great humans, who are helping make all this possible.

TO ELIMINATE  the influence of geographic relationships, shared sounds would only be considered symbolic if they appeared in language from at least of the world's six large and relatively isolated areas:

*North America, South America, Eurasia, Africa, Papua New Guinea and the Pacific islands, and  Australia.*

The researchers also controlled for a false discovery rate of about five percent in order to weed out the the possibility of false positives.

In the end, they found  30 concepts  that were strongly associated with certain  'signals'. 

For example, words for  'round'  were extremely likely to contain the latter  'r,'   including  kokora  [from the indigenous Colombian language Ika],  birbil {from the Basque language of northwestern Spain} and aridonda [from the Chamorro language spoken in the Mariana islands]. 'Sand' was associated with the 's' sound. 

Some concepts were negatively associated with particular sounds   -'skin' is especially likely to not contain  'm'   or 'n'  and  'eye'  probably won't contain the sound  'a'. Also, not all of the rules apply to all languages   -in many cases, English was outlier.

So if you're reading this article, you might be surprised to learn that most words for  'dog'  contain the sound  's', and 'you' usually doesn't have an 'o' or 'u' in it.

''What we think is the really exciting part, is independent of linguistic lineage, independent of whether languages are historically related to one another and independent of geographical location we see these signals showing up over and over again across the world,'' Christiansen said.

Exactly how associations evolved is fodder for several lifetimes of future research, he added. 

Christiansen and his colleagues considered whether it could be a result of evolution from some prehistoric protolanguage spoken by the earliest humans, but various statistical analyses ruled that possibility out.

That leaves ''something psychological and universal as a factor that gives a slight edge to a few sound-meaning associations,'' Johanna Nichols, a prominent linguist and Professor Emerita at the  University of Berkeley, wrote in an email.

It seems there is something biological about our association with certain sounds with ideas. 

For a few of Christiansen's concepts, the explanation appears straightforward. The 'n' in nose {and nev and  hana  and kon and noli} is nasal requiring that we speak through the very organ we're trying to describe.

Things that  are small make high-pitched, squeaking sounds, just like the  ''i''  in tiny, sagheer {Arabic} and liten {Norwegian}. For other associations, the link between signal and signified is more opaque.

This doesn't mean that Saussure was completely wrong about arbitrariness. Though words like nose may share some commonalities, most of the terms in the average adult's  80,000-word vocabulary represent abstract concepts that aren't easily represented with concrete sounds.

When words for the same concept do resemble each other, it is usually a sign that they share an etymological root.

''It is still true that for most part the relation of a word's meaning to its consonants and vowels is arbitrary. This is what makes historical comparison possible in the first place.'' Nichols wrote.

For example, the fact that the words for 'two' in Romance and Slavic languages almost always start with a  d  ''isn't due to some inherited naturalness but  is a  quirk  likely to be inherited,'' she continued  -evidence that the languages share a family history.

''That still stands,'' Nichols said,'' but we now have to add these grains of salt.''

With respectful dedication to the World, Students, Professors and Teachers of the World,too. See Ya all on !WOW!  -the World Students Society and Twitter- !E-WOW!  -the Ecosystem 2011:

''' Celebrating Oneness '''

Good Night and God Bless

SAM Daily Times - the Voice of the Voiceless