The oldest dialect spoke about water, stones and the sky
A group of researchers from the UK, USA and Japan conducted a study to find out how different languages differ from each other in terms of semantic structure.
The semantic structure of a word is a "set of meanings" embedded in this word. According to one of the author's research, American linguist Tanmoy Bhattacharya from the Santa Fe Institute, it is rather difficult to trace such connections between words, since there are no objective criteria in the full sense for this. “We wondered if, for example, the sun and the moon are close to each other as concepts, if both are a shining ball in the sky. Are the sea and sand close, if they are usually nearby? And which of these pairs is more related in terms of semantics? And how to find out?”- the scientist reflects.
The method developed by the researchers was to compare the meanings of different words by repeatedly translating them from one language to another. For this, experts have chosen words denoting concepts that people have dealt with since antiquity, that is, the names of natural objects, celestial bodies, and so on. Each meaning of the word was translated into 80 languages, after which the resulting words, after which the resulting words were also translated taking into account all their meanings, reports Phys.org.
At first, the method of scientists allowed them to primarily pay attention to the differences between words in different languages, and not the similarities between them. For example, in Spanish the word for fire also means passion, and in Swahili it means anger, but not vice versa.
However, further research showed that all languages have a common feature - having made up a kind of "network of meanings" of all the words considered, linguists found that these words are combined into three groups of concepts - "water", "natural solid materials" and "earth and sky ". In any language, the two words within each of these "clusters" were usually much more semantic related than those that belonged to two different groups.
Scientists who have published work in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences assume that their results indicate the common roots of all languages.
Dmitry Erusalimsky
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