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this post was submitted on 04 Oct 2023
95 points (99.0% liked)
Mildly Interesting
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This is for strictly mildly interesting material. If it's too interesting, it doesn't belong. If it's not interesting, it doesn't belong.
This is obviously an objective criteria, so the mods are always right. Or maybe mildly right? Ahh.. what do we know?
Just post some stuff and don't spam.
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You forgot universals, words that wind up with a common derivation in a lot of languages. For example, "Mama" is a common word for mother in completely unrelated languages, because it's derived from babies frequently making mmm sounds first.
Also animal names derived from the sounds said animals make IIRC Crow is an example of this
I kinda touched on that under coincidence, which is admittedly stretching it a bit, but I also think "universals" is a bit of an overly strong name for the phenomenon.
But it is true that there are some underlying elements of human biology and psychology that can cause some interesting effects as well, though I think people have a tendency to exaggerate them.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouba/kiki_effect
This is a pretty classic example of it.