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Ankesh,

Thanks for tossing this in.

Ages ago I saw a doco on words. And the HasBeen Drips Under Pressure (Experts) has traced back our First word for water as being Aqua.

Now, assuming those Scientists who study Mitopchindrial DNA are correct, we All came from the same tribe somewhere in Africa. Hence, all our languages have their Root in that First language. And, just like the Pitcan Islanders, we bastardise our first language into Similar Sounding, but Different words. Hence, the reason why the word for Mother has a similarness about it no matter which Language you look at.

There are also Groups of Languages - such as the Germanic Familiy of Languages.

Another Doco showed how the Chinese Written Language was originally formed. When Emperor Thingy wouold write a Character on a plaque that could be carried around. And as his Troops marches along, all day they saw the new Character on a plaque on the back of the soldier in front. And how the Characters are Abstract representations of the real - such as how the character for Man sort of looks like a Man.

Going back... why we should ahve chosen words like Aqua and something similar to Mother, and other such words is really Unanswerable. We just did. Welcome to that state of ISNESS once again.

Michael Ross

Don,

That's exciting.

Can you send us a copy of the laminated sheet? I have a friend who would like to try this. He's a go getter for knocking on doors and won't quit pestering me to talk about the idea more.

By the way, he had one of the very first info-commercials and has had more successful business ventures than I can shake a stick at.

THANKS!

Best regards,
John Davin

[Ankesh]

Thanks for posting your thoughts Michael.

So there are 2 theories for language:

1. They originated from one same place - a tribe in Africa - where all other humans come from...
2. They originated from different places - but because the brain patterns are same, they sound the same.

We obviously can't go back in time to find the exact answer. But the present can show us light.

New words.
Slangs.

Margaret Magnus did this experiment once. She made up some words that had no meaning. And asked different people to guess what these words meant. And the answers were very similar.

This is very interesting: How do we understand the meaning of made-up words in Dr. Seuss's books?
http://www.conknet.com/~mmagnus/Suess.html

New words originate from their intended phonetic group.

--

I understand what you say about ISness Michael. And I'm not trying to find a unified theory that explains everything. More questions will popup for every question we find an answer to.

But its fun - atleast for me - to find out what makes us tick.

Finding such patterns of language or emotions or facial features will help us become better commnicators too.