Mother. Father. Water. Cold. In almost all languages, the words that define these fundamental truths are similar, or have something of the same music to them. Mother is ‘’umm’ in Arabic, ‘mutter’ in German, ‘maht’ in Russian. (All land is land.) On the contrary, words that describe similar human emotions, like fear, do not sound the same anywhere. ‘Miedo’ is not the same as the English ‘fear’ nor the French ‘peur’. I like to believe that we are more alike in our positive experiences than in our negative ones, that what binds us is stronger than what separates us. Every language is a way of imagining the world. English, for example, is sharp and precise. Spanish tends to be baroque. It is obvious that they have adapted to the needs of the peoples who speak them, because both have stood the test of time. From time to time, academics accept new words that have already been tested in everyday speech, or accept as correct constructions they previously considered ungrammatical.
