How likely are chance resemblances between languages? (2002)

https://www.zompist.com/chance.htm

by benbreen • 2 years ago

70 65 2 years ago

I 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...

Tar90• 2 years ago

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 [...].

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mbabaram_language

n4r9• 2 years ago

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.

angiosperm6• 2 years ago

The description of the Pleiades as "seven sisters" in Australia and Europe is a similar case. People used to think it meant the story had been carried so long, and so far. But 50,000 years seems to be too long.

That said, it has been tens of millennia since a seventh star could be distinguished. People today count six, but it is described as seven most places.

And, the story of the husband who visits the land of the dead and fails to retrieve his wife really was carried all the way to North America. That is probably "only" 15,000 years, from one of the later waves of migration.

omnibrain• 2 years ago

the story of the husband who visits the land of the dead and fails to retrieve his wife

In Europe that's Orpheus and Eurydice, do you have a pointer to the north american story and perhaps a source for the claim that it's really the same story (background)?

__loam• 2 years ago

Finnish and Japanese are fairly similar but weirdly completely unrelated iirc.

TillE• 2 years ago

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?").

metaxy23• 2 years ago

A slight variation of that is even in colloquial English, with "no." As in "we should probably get going, no?"

interestica2• 2 years ago

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.

jimbosis• 2 years ago

In Latin, adding the enclitic -ne to (generally) the first word of a sentence makes that sentence a yes/no question.

See https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1... , especially paragraph #332.

madcaptenor2• 2 years ago

People have mentioned other languages (Polish, Latin, French, English) but the negation particles in all of those languages is from the same source (Proto-Indo-European "ne"). The Japanese one is entirely unrelated though.

throwaway2902• 2 years ago

Same in Russian, no? (or should I say ne?)

schoen• 2 years ago

Also Portuguese, where "né?" is understood as a contraction of "não é?" ("isn't it?").

I don't mean to say that this is a coincidence as far as the European languages go; negation words with N are often a shared inheritance from Indo-European

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-Eur...

Findecanor2• 2 years ago

I've noticed a similar similarity between the particle "yo" in Japanese and adverb "ju" in Swedish, both used for the same purpose at the end of sentences.

User232• 2 years ago

You can do that in English too.

meepmorp• 2 years ago

how are Finnish and Japanese fairly similar? i'm curious what you see that would make them so.

angiosperm6• 2 years ago

The phoneme mix is uncannily similar.

postexitus• 2 years ago

Also Turkish and Hungarian. There are too many similarities between Uralic and Altaic languages that at some point in history they were considered a single language family by some experts (conveniently named Ural-Altaic). According to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ural-Altaic_languages

"There is general agreement on several typological similarities being widely found among the languages considered under Ural–Altaic:

head-final and subject–object–verb word order

in most of the languages, vowel harmony

morphology that is predominantly agglutinative and suffixing zero copula

non-finite clauses

lack of grammatical gender

lack of consonant clusters in word-initial position

having a separate verb for existential clause which is different from ordinary possession verbs like "to have""

dr-detroit• 2 years ago

When I studied this subject in university I was shocked to find out many areas like this are not well understood due to lack of financial incentive to discover it. All that to say there's probably a reason Finnish and Japanese and Spanish are so similar but its not well understood by people in the industry of linguistics yet.

resolutebat2• 2 years ago

Grammatically, they're vaguely similar. The vocabulary has zero overlap though, outside recent mutual borrowings from English.

angiosperm6• 2 years ago

Yet, Ket in central Asia and Navajo in south-central North America are very closely related. Sadly, Ket is close to dead, with only dozens of mostly elderly still fluent. Some suspect it was carried in a migration from Alaska back to Asia.

Languages used in British Columbia and Yukon are in the same family to those, but less similar. It is an example of a common phenomenon, where the extrema of a range retain older features. We see it also in far-west Celt and far-east Tocharian languages. It probably explains how rare genetic features are found in common in isolated South American, Australian, and Indian Ocean refugia, and nowhere between, and in pre-contact eastern US and western Europe haplogroups. Traces between get washed out by later influx.

rafram2• 2 years ago

May be related, not “are very closely related.” There are some cognates between the two families. But no two languages that were separated for 10,000 years are very closely related.

angiosperm6• 2 years ago

They share grammatical peculiarities lost in intermediate languages. Navajo introduced to Ket elders say they are almost inter-intelligible.

DinaCoder992• 2 years ago

We actually do have material evidence connecting pre-age of discovery Siberia with Alaska via Aleutian trade and shared genetics, though, and the strength of the product of evidence is always stronger than a single hypothesis of connection in isolation. To my knowledge no such archeological or genetic link has been established between pre-Vinland saga Greenland and Iceland, let alone Norway.

(Hell, I'm not sure there's any genetic evidence of admixture between the expeditions of Erik the Red and Greenlanders despite clear cultural and material evidence of contact, though that's probably more of a testament to lack of continual trade than evidence it didn't occur at all.)

temporallobe• 2 years ago

Slightly off-topic, but there are some food ethnicities that have interesting overlaps, such as Indian and Italian.

userabchn• 2 years ago

The similarities between the Irish language and Middle Eastern languages was one of the reasons why people thought there had been a mass migration from the Middle East to Ireland, and I think this was at least partly what led British Israelites to dig up Ireland's sacred hill of Tara looking for the Ark of the Covenant. Genetic studies later confirmed that there had in fact been a mass migration from the Middle East to Ireland.

treyd• 2 years ago

Around when did this mass migration take place? Is there any reason posited as to why?

samatman• 2 years ago

The migration wave you're referring to originated in Anatolia and spread across all of Europe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_European_Farmers

In most places, including Ireland, they were displaced, with some assimilation, by the Yamnaya people. Most of the male lineages were extinguished, the genomic contribution from the previous wave is mainly through the female line. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yamnaya_culture

It was the Yamnaya who brought Indo-European languages to Europe, and Ireland. Resemblances between the Irish language and Semitic languages are coincidental.

lastofthemojito• 2 years ago

My favorite little cross-language coincidence is how lots of place names up north end in 'vik'.

In the old Viking world, there's Reykjavík, Keflavík, Grindavík, etc in Iceland. Then over in Norway, you've got Larvik, Malvik, Rørvik, etc. In Sweden: Västervik, Valdemarsvik, Örnsköldsvik.

Then in the new world, Greenland has Aasivik and Arsivik. The Eastern part of the Canadian north has has Aquiatulavik and Iqiattavik and Akulivik. Up in the Northwest Territories there's Aklavik and Inuvik. Cross over into Alaska and you'll find Utqiagvik and Kaktovik.

To make it even more interesting, on Russia's north coast you'll find a Nordvik.

Surely there must have been a prehistoric super-culture up North that founded all of these places right? Not so - in Norse, that 'vik' meant cove, and as a seafaring culture they had a lot of settlements on coves. In Inuit and related languages 'vik' means place, so that ended up in a lot of names. Oh, and the Russian Nordvik was just given a Norwegian name.

So no, there almost certainly wasn't extensive linguistic exchange between Vikings and indigenous people of North America. Although, since L'Anse aux Meadows (the one place Norse are known to have been in North America) means Meadows Cove, I think it should be renamed Meadowvik.

greggsy• 2 years ago

Given that a cove is actually a place, it is reasonable to conclude that there is a connection between the use of this suffix as a descriptor for ‘place’ in both language groups. There may not have been ‘extensive linguistic exchange’ between Northern American and Northern Europeans, but there is evidence that contact had been made, and it’s not outside the realms of possibility that the vik suffix was transferred one way or the other during those encounters.

ytdytvhxgydvhh• 2 years ago

Given that a cove is actually a place, it is reasonable to conclude that there is a connection between the use of this suffix as a descriptor for ‘place’ in both language groups.

I’d say it’s reasonable to say that there could be a connection but it seems like quite a leap to conclude that there is a connection based on current knowledge.

nicklecompte• 2 years ago

IANAL[1] but is it possible that "vik" meant "home" or something as long as 20,000 years ago, before people even populated the Americas, and that this word persisted throughout the development of American and North Germanic languages?

[1] linguist :)

retrac• 2 years ago

Unfortunately for your hypothesis, the etymology of the Norse or Icelandic suffix "-vik" in Reykjavik is known. It means "bay", originally through a sense of a twist or turn, like a turning in along the coast. It is related to English "wend", "wind (up)" or "way". ("Sideways" = "turned to the side".) The same Indo-European root, in a slightly different but related sense (think "turn over") via Latin gives "victor" and "vanquish", and also through Germanic "weaken" (to make yield).

DinaCoder992• 2 years ago

There's essentially no chance of that—any linguistic connection would have happened in the last 2,000 years or so. Spoken language sans written record changes much too fast to preserve such semantics—and, to be clear, I don't think there's any evidence of a morphological feature being preserved that long without becoming mutually unintelligible literally anywhere. Even considering the last 2,000 years you'd have to explain how the language feature hopped over the Sámi (who speak a language much closer to Finnish than Norwegian or Greenlandic) to be established between two cultures with no archaeological or cultural evidence of contact.

Secondly, the semantics of the two suffixes appear to be different, with the Inuit term being a fairly abstract place term, and the Germanic prefix being specifically a geographic location suffix.

akavi• 2 years ago

I've always been amused by the fact that "chilly" in English is so similar to the synonymous "ಚಳಿ" (roughly "Chuh-ly") in Kannada (my family's mother tongue)

xdavidliu2• 2 years ago

my favorite is how the word ant (the insect) is "mah-yi" in chinese, while the word aunt (the family member) is "ah-yi" in chinese. There's tonality differences as well, but I wonder what the probability of that is, and whether there are other examples in english / chinese

bradrn3• 2 years ago

Consulting Wiktionary, it lists several words for ‘aunt’ in Mandarin: depending on the precise relation, it can be gūmǔ, bómǔ, shúmǔ, yímǔ, jiùmǔ, plus some other dialectal synonyms. None of these sound anything like ‘ah-yi’.

gfaure• 2 years ago

This is clearly referring to 阿姨, which is a vocative term of address for an aunt (in particular, on the mother's side). https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E9%98%BF%E5%A7%A8

dang• 2 years ago

One single-comment mini-thread from a while back:

How likely are chance resemblances between languages? (2002) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12335105 - Aug 2016 (1 comment)

User232• 2 years ago

Sounds like the Birthday Paradox, but instead of two people in the room sharing a birthday it’s just there exists some pair whose birthdays are within a week of each other.

marc_abonce• 2 years ago

Zompist

That's a name I haven't heard in a long, long time.

This website has the best guide (afaik) on how to create a conlang[1]. Or at least it was the best guide back in the 2000's, probably something better has been written since but I've been out of touch with the conlang subculture for over a decade now so I have no idea anymore.

https://www.zompist.com/kit.html

bradrn3• 2 years ago

Something better has indeed been written… that being his expanded print edition of the same guide [https://www.zompist.com/lckbook.html], plus the various other books on the subject he’s written. I don’t know of anything better for learning how to conlang, and even just for learning about linguistics it’s very good.

How likely are chance resemblances between languages? (2002)

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