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Comment by munificent | Hacker News Reader

I don't know if I would call it a "language" (which to me implies grammar and some level of composability), but I suspect most people have these hidden subconscious languages too.

Think about the "bouba"/"kiki" effect [1], or how the spells in Harry Potter sound recognizably "spell-like" even though spells aren't a real thing. (In the latter case, it's because they're phonetically Latin-adjacent.)

For example, here are some nonsense terms:

* Swith'eil Aerveid

* Karflon B43

* Hooboo skramp

If I were to ask you all which is a dangerous gas, a sex act, and an Elven city, I suspect there would be fairly wide agreement. Inventing words that are evocative this way is a fundamental part of fiction writing, especially in fantasy, horror, and sci-fi. There's nothing profound going on here, it's just that language recognition is fuzzy and highly associative even at the level of individual phonemes.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouba/kiki_effect

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Immediately after realizing which term is which, I can't help but try to use them all in a sentence together, like "Those damn kids in Swith'eil Aerveid just sit around all day hooboo skramping and smoking their Karflon B43", which I think makes it even more clear how different the words "feel" from each other.

Sounds like the beginning of a pulp fantasy scifi novel. You could submit that sentence to the Little Lytton contest: http://adamcadre.ac/lyttle.html

> There was me. That is, Alex, and my three droogs. That is, Pete, Georgie and Dim. And we sat in the Korova Milk Bar trying to make up our rassoodocks what to do with the evening. The Korova Milk Bar sold milk plus. Milk plus vellocet or synthemesc or drencrom which is what we were drinking. This would sharpen you up and make you ready for a bit of the old ultra-violence.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HI-mDTdeKR8

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nadsat ("droog" from друг 'friend')

Your examples are well done, kudos.

Swith'eil Aerveid, which I took to be the Elven city, immediately made me think of Morrowind. I think it's a perfectly fitting name for a Dunmer or Dunmer city. Maybe a dwarven ruin.

'Tis an excellent place to toss a coin at a wench in return for a hooboo skramp behind the inn.

But the ancients released Karflon B43 into the the woods beyond, mutating the monsters therein. Plenty of coin to be made in clearing the elven lands of these fell beasts, to those brave or foolish enough to try.

Also, there is evidence that there might be some hidden meta-language on humans as well from studies on how bilingual people/polyglots speak, code-switch, translate, etc.

This is fascinating, can you tell me more about it?

This is a major plot point of the novel "Snow Crash" by Neal Stephenson, in case the idea strikes anyone's fancy

“Lexicon” by Max Barry is another good novel that plays with this premise.

You talking about the namshub of enki?

Cryptonomicon is also great.

My native language don't have gender-neutral personal pronouns. If I want to use pronouns correctly in English, I have to make mental pause before writing he or she to figure it out. Woman/man distinction does not come automatically.

When I use or think in English, my brain has weird rules of its own. Some person can have his/her pronoun constantly wrong. For some it's random. Context and rhythm can also can create pattern.

Philipines?

It seems obvious to me that there exists something like this shared across all homo sapiens. What we see now as complex language allowing for the broadcast of abstract thoughts and memes, as well as human culture, must both have evolved alongside each other a period of time that would appear long to us, but is meaningless in terms of genetic drift and "meat evolution". But in order for that process to begin, there must have been an extremely basic structure on which to begin it, which by definition must be in our DNA.

Hard disagree. Seems obvious to me those associations are cultural and extrapolations of previous experiences and stories. Ask these 3 prompts to isolated North Koreans or Papuans (probably after explaining elves are supernatural humanoids from Germanic folklore associated with woods and pointy ears) and I'd bet the house it's gonna be a random distribution.

Involving genetics and evolution in etymology makes no sense.

Yeah, this is pretty silly. Following and recognizing phonetic patterns from science / fantasy fiction naming tropes isn't a "secret language."

Ask a person off the street to come up with an "alien planet in a science fiction TV series" or "deadly gas/virus from a comic book" and you'll get similar answers.

Your average person on the street could probably successfully come up with trope-fitting "evil alien species" and "peaceful alien species" names, too.

And if you asked the average person off a street somewhere with minimal exposure to English and Anglo-American culture to come up with names, and they'd probably come up with something completely different derived from their own cultural tropes and neighbouring foreign languages.

The fact that the baabaa/keekee effect is not cultural is very well documented.

I think the above reply is more along the lines of - if you get into more complex concepts the idea breaks down.

I love doing the bouba/kiki to ppl who know nothing of it. So far none of the "test" have given anything different that what the studies show.

Keekee has sharp consonants and bouba has soft ones regardless of culture indeed. We're in the pattern matching realm, not genetics.

Besides, here is one instance where they failed to reproduce this result in Papua New Guinea.

https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1976-12107-001

With comparative linguistics, almost everything has an exception.

But when perhaps 90% or more of languages do it a certain way on every continent, one does wonder if our thinking tends a certain way. General word order is another an example like that. The indirect object, or patient, or similar category usually is not the first word in a phrase or sentence. "The dog I see" for "I see the dog". "The money him the programmer gave." Like Yoda's species. Only 1 - 2% of languages do it that way consistently, and usually for recent grammatical development reasons, not a long-preserved feature.

Similar story in phonetics. Nearly all languages have at least three stop consonants, usually p, t, k. Closing against the lips, teeth and back of the mouth in the (perhaps obvious?) positions in the mouth to make stop consonants. A few languages only have two of these positions. Some have four or even five, using the throat and using the palate, too. But >95% of them, all over the place, have at least the p, t, k stops. We aren't hardwired, I suspect, with that particular set of noises like we are with crying as a baby. You have to learn them all. It is cultural. Yet almost every culture has converged on at least a somewhat-similar subset. And a few have not.

There are multiple ways to interpret such results, but I lean to something like convergent and parallel cultural evolution.

> There are multiple ways to interpret such results, but I lean to something like convergent and parallel cultural evolution.

So far as I'm aware, that's a very fringe idea in linguistics, and pretty firmly rejected, despite many investigations.

Rather, what you're seeing is propogation from older language influences. Things like Proto-Indo-European have very, very widespread influence - but are still very much not universal.

The pattern I'm talking about shows up across language families. Japanese, Tamil, Quecha, Latin -- are not known to be related but tend to Subject-Object-Verb. English, Chinese, Indonesian, Arabic, Igbo are all Subject-Verb-Object. None of these languages are in families known to be related (except English and Latin). Some 90% of languages in hundreds of unrelated language families are SVO or SOV in basic word order. Most of the remainder are VSO. Object first is extremely rare everywhere. It's a conjecture that, perhaps, all, or most, of the world's language families are related if you go far back enough, and that proto-World was SOV or SVO, but that has not been demonstrated.

So there's no consensus on why these patterns have these tendencies. The sample size is quite large. There's several hundred documented, not-known-to-be-related language families, and language isolates, that must have been separated historically from each other for at least a couple thousand years (or their relation would be pretty obvious). It does look like the tendencies mentioned are retained for a long time in separate populations despite language change, for some reason. That it might be because it relates to how we think is speculation, admittedly.

You can read more about the phenomenon here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_order#Distribution_of_wor... It is a rather striking distribution, isn't it?

> It is a rather striking distribution, isn't it?

No, not at all striking. [0] Merely a reflection from the older influences. Many, many languages that are not grouped in the same families, _are_ descended from PIE, and its children. That is to say, they may not traditional grouped in the same family, but would probably still be considered to be in the Indo-European family.

For an example of this "same family" thing, Japanese, Tamil, Quecha, are all probably descended from Proto-Uralic [1], despite not traditionally being considered sister languages.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Indo-European_language#S...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Uralic_language

No. Quecha is spoken in Peru and Ecuador, in South America. Sami is spoken in northern Scandinavia. Tamil is spoken in Southern India. Japanese is spoken in Japan. They would have had to have spread so far in the past that any systematic relationship becomes opaque to us, linguistically. A valid and compelling demonstration of their relationship would be mind-blowing. It would link the indigenous cultures and peoples of southern Asia, northern Europe and South America culturally, with common origin likely within the last ~10,000 years (about the event horizon of the reconstructive method). I've never heard of that claim made seriously, have you? The only language family known to exist in both Asia and America is the Yeneisian-Dene family [1], the existence of which is still a bit controversial, and which is spoken in northern Siberia and North America (which is more like what you'd expect -- though notably, Navajo is in Arizona).

If we're just going to assume on very loose basis from typological comparison, we might as well assume proto-World, because that's what the sum evidence suggests. But that guess (an idea I do take seriously) is very different from demonstrating their relationship through solid comparative and historical linguistics.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Den%C3%A9%E2%80%93Yeniseian_la...

> I've never heard of that claim made seriously, have you? The only language family known to exist in both Asia and America is the Yeneisian-Dene family

I assume, then, that you've never heard of the Borean languages [0]. Which link the people of southern Asia, northern Europe and South America, culturally, with a common origin around 40-45,000 years ago. The Borean hypothesis is a claim that is made quite seriously, but does not presuppose a universal origin. It is wide reaching, but there are people groups outside of it.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borean_languages

Yes, I have heard of it. Borean effectively is a superset of Altaic or the even more controversial Nostratic. The languages of Iberia 3000 years ago, Ancient Egyptian, classical Mayan, Chinese -- all probably related? This is not generally accepted.

It's an interesting idea, I cannot disprove it. But I don't think it has been proven, either. Even the possible relationship between Uralic, Afroasiatic and Indo-European is not widely accepted yet. Those language families are extensively documented and we can reconstruct their proto-languages convincingly back to somewhat around 10,000 years ago. They look kind of similar in some ways, maybe areal effects? I think to hope for another 10,000 years further back is too much. Borean is a claim about probably further back than even that. The Nostratic and Altaic subsets of the Borean hypothesis, presumably with its proto-language somewhere in Asia around 10,000 years ago, alone is controversial and is not generally accepted.

My gripe is not that there is some convergent etymology, it's attributing it to genetics.

I think a phycist would feel similarly if it was attributed to "human energy" or something like that.

Sure almost all languages share consonants, but there are only so many sounds our mouths can make that has nothing surprising. Yet there are exceptions like Dahalo which is a language made of clicks.

Sure there are similar words from different roots. Say in the 3 languages I speak, mom/maman/mama, dad/papa/tata, no/non/ne. But there's no reason to involve genetics. Some sounds are easier to make for babies/toddlers, it makes sense they would converge toward for universal words like parent appellations.

Protein synthesis doesn't have to play a part in it no matter how magical genetics may seem.

I'm not sure why you think I attribute that to genetics? I was kind of making the same argument you were. It's just the obvious way to do it.

Bit late to answer, so if you read this, sorry. I must've missed your last paragraph which makes it obvious we are thinking about it similarly. I latched onto genetics because it's why I got involved in the thread.

Agreed, without this shared basic structure from birth we would never be able to make sense of any of our sensory inputs of sight/sound/etc, let alone learn a language. Being born with a "clean slate" mind would make interacting with the universe akin to interacting with a black box.

Seems perfectly cromulent too me.

Slightly tangential, but along these lines, I was always very moved by this piece.

https://www.bartleby.com/284/1.html

Everybody even has a non-verbal language they mostly are unaware of. It uses feelings of specific meanings, not words. You'll see the next time you know exactly what you wan to say but can't recall a proper word in any of the languages you speak.

Yeah, that reminded me of Rorschach test and other projective tests. That thread was an example that shows that people benefit from general education and erudition… and that people need a bit more humility to not put forward grandiose claims.

Avada kedavra

Abra kedabra

Yeah, that Harry Potter spells often sound like something else. Leviosa is very close to levitate, for instance. So it's not surprising that many of them seem correct.

Always has sounded to me like "abra cadáver" i.e. "open up corpse [and reveal your magical secrets]" (Portuguese).

Palabra Cadabra

Yep! I’m sure Rowling did that intentionally. By the way, Haaretz says:

“Abracadabra belongs to Aramaic, a Semitic language that shares many of the same grammar rules as Hebrew, says Cohen in Win the Crowd.

‘Abra' is the Aramaic equivalent of the Hebrew 'avra,' meaning, 'I will create. ' While 'cadabra' is the Aramaic equivalent of the Hebrew 'kedoobar,' meaning 'as was spoken.”

https://www.haaretz.com/2013-05-08/ty-article/word-of-the-da...

Must've been a trip for the Haaretz staff writing that puff piece given the antisemitic stuff in the Potter movies: https://www.google.com/search?q=harry+potter+bankers

From the book: "about a head shorter than Harry [...] swarthy, clever face, a pointed beard [...] very long fingers and feet”, indeed.

I lol'd at the "Jewish culture" tag.

Most tellers aren't Jewish. Ability to apply similarities does not imply implication, and says more about the latent racism of the folks making the anti-semetic accusations. As if being Jewish is all about having pointy ears and a nose that is as hooked as a parrot feather? What the fuck.

all antisemitic caricatures are goblinesque, not all goblins are antisemitic caricatures

(granted, having the goblins run the banks is... not great)

I always thought of it more as a reference to the Gnomes of Zürich than to Jewish people.

You might not agree as to the effects of them, but the existence of spells in themselves is a historical, undisputable fact.

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