Among 6,000 Languages in the World Most Sounds are the Same

If we ever needed more proof of our similarities, instead of constant messages of divisiveness, it is now. Researchers who published a first-of-its-kind study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences have just provided us undeniable proof of our unity with their findings. After studying over 6,000 current world languages, they found that two-thirds of the world use very similar words to describe the same things.

Though the researchers were unable to determine why so many people use the same sounds to describe similar objects and ideas, their study broke a previous assumption of linguistics – that the sound of a word and its meaning are completely unrelated. Instead, the scientists found that the sounds we hear around the world are similar, and this is likely why we create language that sounds similar, too.

By looking at approximately 100 basic vocabulary words in sixty percent of the world’s currently used languages – more than 6,000 – they found that 85 percent of linguistic heritages used the same sounds to convey common terms.

The phenomenon was true whether people were describing natural phenomenon like ‘star’ or ‘fish,’ pronouns, or body parts. Even emotions were included in the study. So, even with the unfamiliar parts of a foreign language sounding odd in our ears, there are more similarities than differences, at least when it comes to communicating simple ideas.

Morten Christiansen who headed the study conducted at Cornell’s Cognitive Neuroscience Lab said,

“These sound symbolic patters show up again and again across the world, independent of the geographical dispersal of humans and independent of language lineage.”

He also commented on the larger implications of the study,

“There does seem to be something about the human condition that leads to these patterns. We don’t know what it is, but we know it’s there.”

He also relayed that the commonality must have something to do with how we form language when we are young and how our brains work.

The study abstract states,

“Prominently among these relations, we find property words (“small” and i, “full” and p or b) and body part terms (“tongue” and l, “nose” and n). The areal and historical distribution of these associations suggests that they often emerge independently rather than being inherited or borrowed. Our results therefore have important implications for the language sciences, given that nonarbitrary associations have been proposed to play a critical role in the emergence of cross-modal mappings, the acquisition of language, and the evolution of our species’ unique communication system.”

The poet, Ralph Waldo Emerson believed that, “all creation is one.” He also said that the “creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn.”

If the human mind is created by a Divine, Holographic Program, then we are but a part of the sacred geometry that repeats itself according to established patterns. We have heretofore assumed that the brain itself produces consciousness, but new physics (and old wisdom) has proven that consciousness exists outside the brain, and even outside materialism, so it should be no surprise that we ‘think’ similar thoughts even when it comes to the creation of language.

We bleed the same blood, and apparently we also say “ouch” or “ooch” or “oo” in the same language even if our Mother tongue is different.  There is nothing arbitrary about how we communicate, because even when we don’t speak audible sounds, we talk to one another, down to the cellular level.

You can see this phenomenon, though not pointed out in the study, in the various words used to describe God or the divine around the world – Allah, (God – sounds like ahh), Elohim, Aum, Amen, etc.

In fact, the Heart math institute has talked extensively about how our hearts communicate non-verbally. This is a universal language. Coherence in any other social system – including spoken language – would logically follow. Though times seem chaotic, there is always an underlying harmony and order at work that connects us back to love.

Image credit: www.quora.com