And it is said there is no such thing as co-incidence ! Mbabaram (Barbaram) is a (now) extinct Australian Aboriginal language of north Queensland. Mbabaram is famous in linguistic circles for a striking coincidence in its vocabulary. When language-expert Dixon finally managed to meet one of the last speakers of the language Bennett, he began his study of the language by eliciting a few basic nouns; among the first of these was the word for dog. Bennett supplied the Mbabaram translation, dog. Dixon suspected that Bennett hadnt understood the question, or that Bennetts knowledge of Mbabaram had been tainted by decades of using English. But it turned out that the Mbabaram word for dog really is dog, pronounced almost identically to the English word (compare true cognates such as Yidiny gudaga, Dyirbal guda, Djabugay gurraa and Guugu Yimidhirr gudaa, for example). The similarity is a complete coincidence: there is no discernible relationship between English and Mbabaram. This and other false cognates are often cited as a caution against deciding that languages are related based on a small number of comparisons.
Posted on: Mon, 28 Oct 2013 02:10:34 +0000
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