Why do animals have 'legs' and tables too? This is how all the world's languages reuse words
A study by UPF demonstrates that economy and clarity are the patterns that languages share when creating words
BarcelonaMost of the world's languages use the same patterns when naming the things around us. An international study led by Pompeu Fabra University and published in Nature Human Behaviour states that languages tend towards lexical economy and, therefore, try to reuse known words or parts of words, as long as the context allows and does not generate confusion. According to the researcher from the Department of Translation and Language Sciences, Thomas Brochhagen, language economy is "a cognitive bias" that over time shapes all languages, which speakers do not do consciously or plannedly. The brain tends to seek the fastest routes for communication.
Based on databases compiled by linguists over the last 200 years (the Lexibank repository), the study has performed a computational analysis of 1,995 languages from 193 different families. This extensive research shows that the categorization of languages as diverse as English, Mandarin, Russian, German, Catalan, Swahili, and Quechua uses universal patterns.
The first pattern is that, when words do not share the same context, simplification is imposed and, therefore, the same word is usually used to designate things that have a direct relationship, because it does not generate ambiguity. We only have to think about the word language. In Catalan, the same word defines both the muscle of the mouth and refers to a language – which in English would be differentiated between "tongue and language–. There are many more examples of total overlap of meanings, such as the neck (of the body and the mountain), the leg (of the animal and the table), the leaf (of the tree and for shaving). In more than a hundred languages in the world there is a single word for tree and wood, day and sun, month and moon, milk and breast; although this is not the case in Catalan, because "there are always exceptions".
The second pattern is applied when the same word could generate confusion: then a part of the word or only the root itself is reused. For example, the days of the week, couple binomials (grandmother, grandfather) or lexical families: kitchen, to cook, cook. "The reason is the economy of languages and communicative clarity. If we want to express a new idea, it is more useful to take a word we already know as a starting point than to establish a new one. When the use of the same word can generate ambiguity, a second option is resorted to before a completely new word. This leaves its trace in all languages of the world. In many languages, we speak of the face of a mountain or a building, to avoid saying the front part", explains Brochhagen to ARA. The third pattern occurs when confusion could arise: in this case, very different words are chosen.
The globalization and the predominance of languages like English or Chinese are likely to change other languages because it influences the adoption of words, often without adapting them to the grammatical functioning of native languages. This has already happened in history. When slavery brought millions of people to the Americas, they arrived with their languages. "New languages were created, and many times we see that a simpler grammar is used. The basic difference between Catalan and English is morphology. English has a simpler system, but, on the other hand, it is more syntactically inflexible," he exemplifies.
From psychology and linguistics, neural functions can also be accessed indirectly. "The way we organize meaning in different languages opens a window to the brain, to our cognition," says the German scientist, who has lived in Barcelona since 2020, in perfect Catalan.
