Re: searching for common words for all today's languages

From: Richard Wordingham
Message: 43297
Date: 2006-02-08

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Brian M. Scott" <BMScott@...> wrote:
>
> At 5:03:47 PM on Sunday, February 5, 2006, Richard
> Wordingham wrote:

> > On the noise side, we may well have the problem that,
> > statistically speaking, the association between sound and
> > meaning is not arbitrary.
>
> The sort of thing that John Lawler looks at and, more
> ambitiously, Margaret Magnus? I've read just a little.

No, that seems to be within languages. The sort of thing I have in
mind is grammatical parallels such as an 'm' object/transitive marker
and an s-causative mentioned in the context of Nostratic, and the s-
valency increaser (e.g. causative, instrument focus) and m- valency
decreaser in the context of the Sino-Tibetan-Austronesian hypothesis.
Either we seem to have something very ancient, a mere coincidence, or
re-interpretation producing similar grammars from different beginnings.

For non-arbitrary meanings we probably have the mama, papa, and tata
words, though I'm not sure what happens if the link is broken.
Perhaps we just have an atypical form of inheritance, just like
Pokorny's PIE *kuku and English _cuckoo_ - the word keeps being
irregularly forced back into the right phonetic shape. And how
linguistic does the widespread (universal?) 'ha! ha!' get.

Richard.