He mentions a study published by a team of scientists in 2016 that analyzed the associations in sound and meaning in thousands of human languages. The team found a hundred or so archetypal words that are similar across continents and linguistic lineages—among them star, leaf, knee, bone, tongue, and nose. The distribution and history of these associations suggests that these archetypal words weren’t inherited or borrowed but emerged independently. Could the same thing be happening in birds? asks Feeney. “Could there be an international bird word for cuckoo?”
