Universal patterns emerge across 22 languages, mapping how vocabularies evolve
1mon 21d ago by lemy.lol/u/cm0002 in linguistics@mander.xyz from phys.org
English and in 21 other languages
It would be nice to know what those were.
I had to dig quite a bit into the paper to find it:
English and up to 21 other languages (Bengali, Catalan, Danish, German, Esperanto, Spanish, Finnish, French, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Dutch, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Swedish, Thai, Chinese)
Frankly that's poor sampling — 18/22 of the languages are Indo-European and/or spoken mostly in Europe.
If only they expanded on what those patterns tend to actually look like (besides merely mentioning that popular words are found with other popular words) in a way that could be used to inform language learning