Except that, apparently, we have. That word is “huh”. According to a recent study it seems to be pretty universal. The scientists (in what sounds like an excellent idea for a research trip), recorded bits of informal language from 5 continents, and of the 31 dialects they compiled, all had this same word in common.
One Single Word
The researchers have suggested that the reason 'huh' is the only word to have spontaneously adopted the same meaning in almost every language is because there is no other word that is capable of filling its place.
What word is the same in almost every language? Ananas. If you're wondering what the word above means, it's the word “pineapple” translated into…well, pretty much every major language except for English.
Cognates are words in two more more languages with similar spellings and pronunciations. They also have similar meanings. Some languages, such as French and Spanish, are closely related. These languages have many cognates.
Cognates are words in two languages that share a similar meaning, spelling, and pronunciation.
Universal words mean the same for everyone, with only a few exceptions. If everyone in the world learns Klingon, it'll be universal.
In historical linguistics, cognates or lexical cognates are sets of words in different languages that have been inherited in direct descent from an etymological ancestor in a common parent language.
The Oldest Word in the World. It is believed the first spoken word was “Aa,” which meant hey. “Aa” is thought to have first been spoken by an australopithecine in Ethiopia over a million years ago.
The 23 "ultra-conserved words" uncovered by the study are: thou, I, not, that, we, to give, who, this, what, man/male, ye, old, mother, to hear, hand, fire, to pull, black, to flow, bark, ashes, to spit, worm.
Yes, pizza goes by different names in different countries. In Italy, where pizza originated, it is simply called "pizza. Well, yes and no. Pretty much every country in the world has pizza, and calls it pizza, and it will be similar to American pizza, sometimes with funkier cheese or a non-tomato-based sauce.
There are few, if any, words that are the same across all languages and language families, but a team of linguistic researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands think they might have found one: “Huh.”
For the most part, the word amen has almost remained intact for thousands of years. In addition, amen is used across multiple languages. The word amen is not translated into different words from one language to another; the word amen is the same in Hebrew, Arabic, and English today.
The word Hallelujah is a word that is almost universal and needs no translation! Most languages do not translate this word. It simply means “praise Yah” or praise Yahweh (God)(Jehovah). It is used 24 times in the Hebrew Bible and four times in the New Testament in the book of Revelation.
The local version of Huh? is specifically shaped to the language. It is a real word, not a grunt. It is incorporated into the local language system. To say that this word varies in form depending on the language system in which it is embedded is not inconsistent with saying that it is universal.
Except for Frisian, Dutch is linguistically the closest language to English, with both languages being part of the West Germanic linguistic family. This means many Dutch words are cognates with English (meaning they share the same linguistic roots), giving them similar spelling and pronunciation.
Ultimately, the authors ask whether “huh” is a universal word and decide on a “qualified yes”—though it doesn't sound exactly the same everywhere, every language has a “huh,” and it's almost always used for clarification (or “repair,” as it's called in linguistic circles).
A new study, however, suggests that's not always true. A team of researchers has come up with a list of two dozen “ultraconserved words” that have survived 150 centuries. It includes some predictable entries: “mother,” “not,” “what,” “to hear” and “man.” It also contains surprises: “to flow,” “ashes” and “worm.”
cognate • \KAHG-nayt\ • adjective. 1 : of the same or similar nature 2 : related; especially : related by descent from the same ancestral language.
Scientists at the University of Reading have discovered that 'I', 'we', 'who' and the numbers '1', '2' and '3' are amongst the oldest words, not only in English, but across all Indo-European languages.
Old English – the earliest form of the English language – was spoken and written in Anglo-Saxon Britain from c. 450 CE until c. 1150 (thus it continued to be used for some decades after the Norman Conquest of 1066).
What are the Romance languages? The Romance languages are a group of related languages all derived from Vulgar Latin within historical times and forming a subgroup of the Italic branch of the Indo-European language family. The major languages of the family include French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and Romanian.
There are currently around 6,500 languages in the world. The country with the most languages and dialects is probably Papua New Guinea, a country on the border between Asia and Australia with historically numerous trade relations in large parts of Asia, Australia and Oceania.
The Proto-Human language (also Proto-Sapiens, Proto-World) is the hypothetical direct genetic predecessor of all the world's spoken languages.