Comment by p-e-w
7 hours ago
There’s an overlap, but the observation from the parent comment turns this widely cited phenomenon from a supposed mystery or deep insight into something trivial.
It’s like observing that humans across cultures agree that the word “woof” refers to a dog and the word “miaw” refers to a cat… no shit.
I hope you understand that just because a proposed explanations makes intuitive sense, it doesn't automatically have to be right.
Edit - it seems there's evidence that this intuitive explanation is wrong, see the article linked here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50146562
This is why I like to remind myself that the world is much more interesting than I often think, which is why the drive to jump to simple and boring explanations can often be a trap.
As I get older, I consistently find the world to be far less interesting than I used to believe. So many factoids that I once marveled at have turned out to be false or exaggerated, or now seem pretentious and forced to me even if they are true.
It’s been a long, long time that I heard something new and was genuinely, deeply amazed rather than just filling it away into the endless gallery of things I’m supposed to be amazed by according to others.
Dont know how old you are or what age has to do with it. But i find that as I get older simple factoids about the world are even more amazing. There are 4 forces we know of. Strong, weak,electromagnetic and gravitational. Thats magic and that gets more interesting the more you meditate on it.
It means all matter is acting on each other at all times. It means your existence, acting through your will changes the universe, because something as simple as moving tweaks this balance.
Its the same with so many things like the water cycle or other seemingly boring elementary concepts of our reality.
Interestingly, in practice different languages tend to have markedly different common representations of animal sounds.
In Korean, dogs say meong (멍), sounds like mung) rather than woof.
In Romanian the dog says 'ham ham'
In Spanish, they say "guau" (pronounced like "wow")
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Sure, and not every single person agrees with the proposed phonetic shape-matching either, but the broad trend does hold and there is similarly in animal vocalizations even across unrelated languages.
I don't think the insight is trivial, but to each their own I suppose.