Doesn't (Ki)Swahili name all languages with a ki- prefix? (This may be
yet another myth, like that all country names end in "guó" in Chinese,
so I'm just asking, but I tend to be skeptical about claims that this
is "not how the human brain works".)
But if this is demonstrably not how languages work, can you give some
pointers to the demonstration?
The situation with Swahili (and other Bantu languages) is different for any number of reasons. First off, the language prefix exists as part of a system in which EVERY NOUN starts with a prefix that indicates its noun class. The prefixes thus exist as part of an entire system; it's not just something that language names do, it is something that all nouns everywhere in the language do. Plus, the prefixes on the nouns (or, more appropriately, the class of nouns to which a word belongs, which is indicated by the prefix) are used for a variety of syntactic functions--you can tell who is doing what to whom by virtue of prefixes that go on the verbs, which correspond to the noun classes that are marked on the nouns.
In terms of "how the brain works," what I mean is that the brain processes speech linearly. But, as with everything in nature, the brain is also lazy, and tries to use context to determine what is coming up. So, imagine that I say, "The longest word in the English language is a..."
At this point, your brain has already thrown out a bunch of possibilities. It's thrown out anything that doesn't start with /a/. It's also likely already thrown out short words, because I'm looking for something long. "Ant" is likely not part of the set of words that my brain is looking at.
"...nt..."
I still know it isn't ant, but now I also know what it starts with, and what it doesn't. By the time I get to:
"...idises..."
You likely know what I'm going to say, assuming you've heard the word "antidisestablishmentarianism" before. And all that before I got half way through the word! There are any number of experiment verifications of this: your brain processes language as it goes along, and if that information is not helpful or is not what it expected, it creates problems, because your brain now has to backtrack or, in the case of having language names start with the same thing, has to suddenly sort through the whole list, instead of having paired down in steps.
My point with starting everything with some form of "bang" means that your brain will not be able to do anything at all to get any closer to what you were trying to say. Plus, it won't help me if we're in a loud room and I don't quite here what you said. If the first element was meaningful with a system, then it can help in both of those ways.