Re: Speculation

When I posted this, I thought I was going to sound like the next manic soapbox speaker. I didn't even know there was a name for these ideas. Several names, in fact :o)

You have discovered for yourself the so-called "mi/ti" phenomenon -- the universal preference for certain sound classes to express certain grammatical functions.
(Piotr)

You're treading on the now-dead "googoo" theory, if I'm not mistaken... or
is it the "bowwow" theory... maybe it was the "gaga" theory...
(Glen)

Piotr:
"Nobody says that any 1sg pronoun _must_ contain a nasal, but
they _do_ contain nasals often enough for linguists to
wonder why that should be the case.I gave the example of
proto-Bantu *mi-, and there are plenty of New World examples
(discussed at length in Campbell 1997 [American Indian
Languages: the Historical Linguistics of Native America.
Oxford: OUP])."

Note taken. The hunch that such tendencies might exist wasn't as far-fetched as I thought it was.

Glen:
"As you can see, just about ANY initial phoneme exists for 1ps stems. The
belief that /m-/ is THE sound for the 1ps pronoun is a Eurocentric
dillusion, thought up by pseudolinguists who knew very little about world
languages and only spoke IndoEuropean languages where *me is common."

I didn't say the universal 1st person singular pronoun must be 'm'. I was wondering if the 1st person singular could really be associated with ANY sound. Perhaps there are, not necessarily one, but maybe a handful of sounds that people "naturally" associate with their own self, with the meaning "I", "me". Looking at your list, Glen, there are more low vowels - a, o, u - than high vowels (of course, this is no proof, or even worthy of being called a serious theory; I'm not attempting to prove anything here, just playing with an idea that has caught my fancy). I'm interested in this not only for linguistical reasons - if we would find that such correspondences between sounds and ideas (or sounds and experiences) actually exist, we would have learnt something about human nature that we didn't know before.

There are no straightforward correspondences between the meaning of a word and the way it sounds, but there are tendencies, which I thought it would be interesting to explore. For example, in Latin a squeaky little "i" in "minus" (small) contrasts with the "a" in "majus" (big); in Finnish we have "pieni" meaning "small" etc. Or think about all the "mamma" words in all the world's languages - no harsh or aggressive sounds were chosen to signify "mother". Of course there are counterexamples (just for starters, there's an "i" in English "big"), language is influenced by many tendencies and factors. The "googoo factor", if that's what you want to call it, is just one factor among many, and it's probably not the most important factor that is shaping language, but this factor caught my interest.

Glen again:
"Linguists are not yet knowledgeable enough to be an adequate
judge of what is due to genetic relationship and what is due to universal
phonemic tendency on a global scale."

True. And we also don't know what is due to mere random similarity - and we probably won't ever know.

Glen:
"We never question that there is inheirant meaning in computer bits, and yet
different machines use different combinations of these bits for the same
instructions."

I disagree. Computer bits are completely meaningless to the computers who use them, and therefore they could just as well use any sequence of bits to represent a certain digit, but words are not meaningless to humans, on the contrary, they mean a lot to us. Words are always connected with values, experiences, feelings; some words bring fear, others hope - we are shaped by words and _we shape them_ according to our experiences and feelings. Would we ever give an aggressive sound to a word that is associated with hope and friendship?

Glen:
"Yes, I'm aware of the cornucopia of 1ps forms in Japanese and Vietnamese for
not only person and number, but also gender, social rank, age, etc, which
surely are relatively recent replacements that drown out any trace of any
originally "nasal" pronoun but overall it would appear that replacement is
not a common, everyday occurence of world languages, happening every few
millenia or so in any particular linguistic line."

English replaced "thou" with "you" pretty recently, and Rhodes (the guy whose paper made me post these ideas) lists a few other examples (a new 1st person singular derived out of the 1st person plural, etc.), but I don't know how common this is. Off-topic, but anyway: when "thou" was replaced, it was not replaced with "ye", the nominative, but with "you", originally an accusative form, because the vowel sound of "you" contrasted better with the "high" vowels of the other pronouns: I, he, she, it - says Rhodes. This tendency to favour contrasts is yet one more factor that shapes language.

Glen:
"The forms and complexity of
language have changed from the single-celled amoeba to humankind, but
everything remains the same in the end."

I'll have to ponder this for a while...


That's all for now!
Glad to hear you thought this idea was worthy of discussing,
Hakan