Words describing rough surfaces are highly likely to feature a ’trilled /r/’ sound
Words describing rough surfaces are highly likely to feature a 'trilled /r/' sound - In languages spoken around the world, words describing rough surfaces are highly likely to feature a 'trilled /r/' sound - a linguistic pattern that stretches back over 6,000 years, a new study reveals. Language scientists first analysed words for 'rough' and 'smooth' in a worldwide sample of 332 spoken languages - discovering a strong link between the sounds of speech and the sense of touch, which has influenced the structure of modern languages. Compared to words meaning 'smooth', words that mean 'rough' were nearly four times as likely to contain a trilled /r/ sound - from Basque zakarra and Mongolian barzgar to Dutch ruw and Hungarian durva, these words feature the common sound - an 'r' pronounced as an Italian speaker might say 'arrivederci'. Next, they found that the '/r/-for-rough' pattern is prevalent across sensory words in 38 present-day Indo-European languages. It can even be traced to the reconstructed roots of Proto-Indo-European - indicating that the pattern has likely existed in this large language family for more than six millennia. In the case of English and Hungarian, two unrelated languages, they found that in both languages, some 60% of words for rougher textures, such as 'rough', 'coarse', 'gnarled' and 'durva', 'érdes', 'göcsörtös' contain an '/r/' sound - more than twice as frequent as for words for smoother textures, such as 'smooth', 'silky', 'oily' and 'sima', 'selymes', 'olajos'.
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