Swith'eil Aerveid, which I took to be the Elven city, immediately made me think of Morrowind. I think it's a perfectly fitting name for a Dunmer or Dunmer city. Maybe a dwarven ruin.
When I use or think in English, my brain has weird rules of its own. Some person can have his/her pronoun constantly wrong. For some it's random. Context and rhythm can also can create pattern.
Cryptonomicon is also great.
Involving genetics and evolution in etymology makes no sense.
Ask a person off the street to come up with an "alien planet in a science fiction TV series" or "deadly gas/virus from a comic book" and you'll get similar answers.
Your average person on the street could probably successfully come up with trope-fitting "evil alien species" and "peaceful alien species" names, too.
I love doing the bouba/kiki to ppl who know nothing of it. So far none of the "test" have given anything different that what the studies show.
Besides, here is one instance where they failed to reproduce this result in Papua New Guinea.
But when perhaps 90% or more of languages do it a certain way on every continent, one does wonder if our thinking tends a certain way. General word order is another an example like that. The indirect object, or patient, or similar category usually is not the first word in a phrase or sentence. "The dog I see" for "I see the dog". "The money him the programmer gave." Like Yoda's species. Only 1 - 2% of languages do it that way consistently, and usually for recent grammatical development reasons, not a long-preserved feature.
Similar story in phonetics. Nearly all languages have at least three stop consonants, usually p, t, k. Closing against the lips, teeth and back of the mouth in the (perhaps obvious?) positions in the mouth to make stop consonants. A few languages only have two of these positions. Some have four or even five, using the throat and using the palate, too. But >95% of them, all over the place, have at least the p, t, k stops. We aren't hardwired, I suspect, with that particular set of noises like we are with crying as a baby. You have to learn them all. It is cultural. Yet almost every culture has converged on at least a somewhat-similar subset. And a few have not.
There are multiple ways to interpret such results, but I lean to something like convergent and parallel cultural evolution.
So far as I'm aware, that's a very fringe idea in linguistics, and pretty firmly rejected, despite many investigations.
Rather, what you're seeing is propogation from older language influences. Things like Proto-Indo-European have very, very widespread influence - but are still very much not universal.
So there's no consensus on why these patterns have these tendencies. The sample size is quite large. There's several hundred documented, not-known-to-be-related language families, and language isolates, that must have been separated historically from each other for at least a couple thousand years (or their relation would be pretty obvious). It does look like the tendencies mentioned are retained for a long time in separate populations despite language change, for some reason. That it might be because it relates to how we think is speculation, admittedly.
You can read more about the phenomenon here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_order#Distribution_of_wor... It is a rather striking distribution, isn't it?
No, not at all striking. [0] Merely a reflection from the older influences. Many, many languages that are not grouped in the same families, _are_ descended from PIE, and its children. That is to say, they may not traditional grouped in the same family, but would probably still be considered to be in the Indo-European family.
For an example of this "same family" thing, Japanese, Tamil, Quecha, are all probably descended from Proto-Uralic [1], despite not traditionally being considered sister languages.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Indo-European_language#S...
If we're just going to assume on very loose basis from typological comparison, we might as well assume proto-World, because that's what the sum evidence suggests. But that guess (an idea I do take seriously) is very different from demonstrating their relationship through solid comparative and historical linguistics.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Den%C3%A9%E2%80%93Yeniseian_la...
I assume, then, that you've never heard of the Borean languages [0]. Which link the people of southern Asia, northern Europe and South America, culturally, with a common origin around 40-45,000 years ago. The Borean hypothesis is a claim that is made quite seriously, but does not presuppose a universal origin. It is wide reaching, but there are people groups outside of it.
It's an interesting idea, I cannot disprove it. But I don't think it has been proven, either. Even the possible relationship between Uralic, Afroasiatic and Indo-European is not widely accepted yet. Those language families are extensively documented and we can reconstruct their proto-languages convincingly back to somewhat around 10,000 years ago. They look kind of similar in some ways, maybe areal effects? I think to hope for another 10,000 years further back is too much. Borean is a claim about probably further back than even that. The Nostratic and Altaic subsets of the Borean hypothesis, presumably with its proto-language somewhere in Asia around 10,000 years ago, alone is controversial and is not generally accepted.
I think a phycist would feel similarly if it was attributed to "human energy" or something like that.
Sure almost all languages share consonants, but there are only so many sounds our mouths can make that has nothing surprising. Yet there are exceptions like Dahalo which is a language made of clicks.
Sure there are similar words from different roots. Say in the 3 languages I speak, mom/maman/mama, dad/papa/tata, no/non/ne. But there's no reason to involve genetics. Some sounds are easier to make for babies/toddlers, it makes sense they would converge toward for universal words like parent appellations.
Protein synthesis doesn't have to play a part in it no matter how magical genetics may seem.
Abra kedabra
“Abracadabra belongs to Aramaic, a Semitic language that shares many of the same grammar rules as Hebrew, says Cohen in Win the Crowd.
‘Abra' is the Aramaic equivalent of the Hebrew 'avra,' meaning, 'I will create. ' While 'cadabra' is the Aramaic equivalent of the Hebrew 'kedoobar,' meaning 'as was spoken.”
https://www.haaretz.com/2013-05-08/ty-article/word-of-the-da...
From the book: "about a head shorter than Harry [...] swarthy, clever face, a pointed beard [...] very long fingers and feet”, indeed.
I lol'd at the "Jewish culture" tag.
(granted, having the goblins run the banks is... not great)
Think about the "bouba"/"kiki" effect [1], or how the spells in Harry Potter sound recognizably "spell-like" even though spells aren't a real thing. (In the latter case, it's because they're phonetically Latin-adjacent.)
For example, here are some nonsense terms:
* Swith'eil Aerveid
* Karflon B43
* Hooboo skramp
If I were to ask you all which is a dangerous gas, a sex act, and an Elven city, I suspect there would be fairly wide agreement. Inventing words that are evocative this way is a fundamental part of fiction writing, especially in fantasy, horror, and sci-fi. There's nothing profound going on here, it's just that language recognition is fuzzy and highly associative even at the level of individual phonemes.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouba/kiki_effect