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Comparison of universal colexification networks of emotion concepts with Austronesian and Indo-European language families. Credit: T. H. Henry
How do you know that a 12-inch ruler is in fact 12 inches
long? You don't. You trust. I don't know who you trust, if it's the
ruler manufacturer, or the society you live in, or who else. But you don't
actually know how long that ruler really is.
How do ruler manufacturers know how long 12 inches is? They
use a ruler, of course. And where does that ruler come from?
I work in a field where we have to take very precise and
accurate measurements of environmental conditions, such as
nanogram-concentrations of mercury vapor in the air. If your equipment thinks
it's pulling 0.2 liters per minute of air instead of 0.3, then what happens
after 8 hours worth of minutes? You get a very distorted sense of how much
mercury is in the air (96 vs 144 liters to begin with).
This is why we calibrate our equipment, using another piece
of equipment to make sure ours is doing what it says it does. Sure we could
talk about The
Kilogram, which until last year was used to calibrate every other
kilogram-measuring thing ever, and was protected in multiple nested glass
encasements in a vault in the basement of a nondescript building in the remote
countryside of France.
But instead, we're going talk about language. Because
there's no Kilogram for language.
***
In the same way that we don't know how long any particular
ruler is if we don't have an ur-ruler,
how do I know that your meaning of a word is the same as mine? This is like
asking if the red you see is the same red I see. Or if the pain you feel is the
same pain I feel. Language, like feelings in general, is subjective. How can we
calibrate something that has no universal standard?
Language, unlike feelings, does offer a metric by which we
can compare and even measure it's meaning to different people. It's not a
surprise; words are the way we measure language. But not until now, with the
era of Big Data fully upon us, can we can put all the words in the world into
one database
and compare their meanings across all languages, using the database itself as
the closest thing to a universal measuring rod that we can get.
This is called colexification, where we draw lines between
all the words in that database, and find common denominators and groupings of
words. The goal is to create a universal structure of emotional language that
can be used to calibrate and understand these words and especially the people
who use them. These are called "emotion colexification networks," and
they show us for example how in Austronesian languages, "surprise"
is associated with "fear,"
whereas Tai-Kadai languages associate "surprise" with the concepts
"hope" and "want." (Take a look at the top image in this
post.)
In other words, we can now see that if you say you're
surprised, but you're saying that in an Austronesian language, then you're
probably not so happy, although in English, the word surprise represents
something more like happiness.
The researchers working with this ultimate cross-lingual
lexicon found significant variations on the positioning of words in the network
– the meaning of words changes a lot as you go from one language to another,
even if those words are translated as equal with each other.
***
In closing, this is interesting research for the world of
olfaction, which is another one of those severely subjective phenomena. In
fact, the researchers in this study use the same two data points as for
olfactory studies, those being valence and intensity. It should be obvious,
because the limbic system is the common denominator between the two. The limbic
system is the domain of our emotions and of olfactory experience.
Post-Script
Also like in the very recent olfactory research, this study
is made possible because of an advance in the database used. CLICS is a
database of colexifications involving 2474 languages from around the world;
only a few years ago this database had only 300 languages in it.
Notes
J.C. Jackson el al. Science (2019).
Dec 2019, phys.org
THE UR-RULER
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