u/Remote-Range1618

If you think about it, every word would have come from a high frequency term at some point in its history. Therefore, it can be said that the more common words in a language get passed down to another one, and assuming the languages themselves don't innovate a lot of new vocabulary, does this mean the backbone of language consists of a few, very common root terms? Additionally, if the most common words in the languages are passed down from language to language, to what extent is strengthening of common terms occuring, and what forces balance this strengthening out? Does the balance come from the fact that a language is changing, like kwekwlos vs. wheel, or an iconicity cycle, whether a word needs more iconic innovation or iconic simplicity?

I am not sure to what extent this is true, but I noticed that some words for mother and father seem to be regionally impacted (they are words based on baby's speech, and thus it would make sense that they are flexible and can change when in contact with another language as the exact babbling word chosen is sometimes not as stable). For instance, in West Asian languages (this includes PIE, although the exact influence on PIE words is debatable) the forms often resemble ana and ata. Although this pattern isn't perfect, there does appear to be some form of regionality, even though similar patterns repeat throughout the world. Is understanding linguistic contact based on variable vocabulary possible in this way?

If iconicities could be made numerical, then we could summon if two languages have the same iconicity value for a certain 'isolated enough' concepts that might be less consistently iconicized across languages (but also commonly referenced enough so that the iconicity doesn't die), and this comes up very often and is statistically improbable to be a coincidence, it can hint that the words are related.