This world of ours is really big! Five continents, different countries and different cultures. We are all the same, but at the same time we are unique human beings. There are many languages and dialects that can be real linguistic barriers, as, unfortunately, we cannot go around the world talking to people from different countries. Still, we manage to communicate, whether by gestures or by trying to speak the local language. Thinking about our differences, behold, a curious question arises: is there a word common to all languages?
The answer to the question is categorical: no. That's right, there is no word that unites us in this wonderful linguistic universe of different languages. It seems risky to say that no word is the same or at least similar in all languages, but who he claims are the language scientists, who find it unlikely that there is a kind of “wild word”. But do you know why this happens?
Claiming that there is a word that is common in all languages is practically impossible. We are linguistically very different!
The different languages in the world have different etymological roots, that is, they originate from different linguistic traditions. For example, our language, the Portuguese language, is of Latin origin, while English, one of the most spoken languages in the world, is of West Germanic origin and was taken to Great Britain by German invaders from several islands of what is now northwestern Germany and the countries Lows. Some languages, such as Portuguese, Spanish, French and Italian, for example, which have origins in Greco-Roman culture, may have words whose pronunciation or writing are the same. But when we think of Eastern languages (Arabic and Hebrew, for example), they have totally different etymologies, it is difficult to find any similarity, any word that be common.
The differences happen because languages have very different internal mechanisms. A word "imported" from another language (a foreignism, for example) may simply not be well accepted among speakers from another country or even not adapt to the phonological context. Hence, from this linguistic non-adaptation, new words emerge according to the needs and according to the pronunciation. There may even be a common word around the world (such as the word taxi), but we cannot say that the Amazon Indians know it, right? Therefore, there is no word that is the same in all languages, a word that is capable of opening all the doors of our intricate linguistic universe has not yet emerged.
By Luana Castro
Graduated in Letters
