The Ancient Language That Has Grammar Based On The Human Body

The language of the Indigenous people of the Andaman Islands was an enigma. Linguist Anvita Abbi returned to the location of the islands in the northeastern Indian Ocean many times to try and decode the dying languages of the people who lived there. Her quest to understand a family of disappearing languages reads like a classic mystery, with the payoff being the discovery of an unusual linguistic structure different from any other language she had encountered before. As she writes:

"Great Andamanese, it turns out, is exceptional among the world's languages in its anthropocentrism. It uses categories derived from the human body to describe abstract concepts such as spatial orientation and relation between objects."

So, for example, when she asked one native speaker the word for blood - he could only answer once he knew from what part of the body the blood was coming. The word was different based on this detail. When something as fundamental as the structure of language can be this divergent, it reminds us that great discoveries usually come from those who are willing to rethink their most basic assumptions.