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English May Have Retained Words From an Ice Age Language
sciencehabit writes "If you've ever cringed when your parents said 'groovy,' you'll know that spoken language can have a brief shelf life. But frequently used words can persist for generations, even millennia, and similar sounds and meanings often turn up in very different languages. Now, a new statistical approach suggests that peoples from Alaska to Europe may share a linguistic forebear dating as far back as the end of the Ice Age, about 15,000 years ago. Indeed, some of the words we use today may not be so different than those spoken around campfires and receding glaciers."
My kids think I'm way cool when I say 'Groovy', (you insensitive clod). Laters.
This is, like, totally tubular!
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Mare - Mother or often in English Ma
Pore - Father or again often Pa
Fi - fire
Those are the only non-loan words that overlap that I've come across
It is interesting that there are any words in common of course
This is a pretty lame summary. If there are words preserved from the Ice Age, list like five of them!
I don't know why people even bother to publish this kind of research. Sure, it's fun to make a tree of relations between words, but the result doesn't mean a thing. The analysis is built upon 200 entries from an etymological dictionary, which is in itself a big bag of assumptions, and they managed to exclude 10% of those, including some very high frequent words (and, in, when, where, with).
Take this one with a grain of salt...
What an excellent theory. Next time I come up with a new theory I was also make sure that it cannot ever be verified one way or the other.
How about this - statistical research shows that in all probability people used to grunt a lot 15,000 years ago. Not just any grunt, mind you, but they grunted in exactly ten different ways.
Think of this for a moment - for the parts of the mind that are more pre-patterned and instinctive, there may be some component of cognition that encourages, say "Fi" as a root sound for fire. I would argue this is merely a byproduct of how our speech centers are formed, but I can't see any reason this wouldn't exist. Just as laughter is to a degree innate in the sound we make, I'm sure some amount of word association is built off of those same kinds of patterning.
Another example: google "machine elf" for the use of recreational drugs. Either there really is a machine elf, or the human mind produces similar hallucinations under similar conditions, on average. Same kind of thing.
From the article, if you can't be bothered clicking the link:
The words not, that, we, who, and give are cognates in five language families, and nouns and verbs including mother, hand, fire, ashes, worm, hear, and pull are shared by four. Going by the rate of change of these cognates, the model suggests that these words have remained in a similar form since about 14,500 years ago, thus supporting the existence of an ancient Eurasiatic language and its now far-flung descendants.
From Google:
Mother in England
Matr in Russia
Motina in Lithuanian
Mater in Latin
Manman in Haitian Creole
Ma in Chinese
Mwtr in Yiddish
Mteay in Khmer
I'm a fruit pirate. I bought a watermelon once, and spat the seeds in the back yard. They grew into another watermelon,
Some anthropologists think our ancestors already "had language" when our species began to spread around the world. If so, it may be that every language in the world is related. (The alternative being that language was invented independently more than once, and that more than one lineage has survived to the present.)
The problem is how you demonstrate it rigorously. Every historical linguist accepts the relatedness of languages in 5000-year-old families. But for proposed older relations (e.g., Nostratic, 10,000-15,000 ybp), the number of linguists that accept them is pretty much inversely proportional to the time depth.
As one of the linked summary articles points out, the further back you go the less evidence you have (lexical replacement), and the more noise (spurious similarities arising from chance). Beyond a certain point you just can't demonstrate relatedness reliably, though exactly what that point is is up for debate.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
"... campfires and receding glaciers..."
Aha, the campfires! That explains it. It was the CO2 from burning bristle-cone pines.
Meanwhile, the Neanderthals wiped themselves out by driving SUVs...
As long as there are still polar ice sheets, the ice age hasn't ended.
I think that popular science magazines in the 90ies were already bringing this piece of news to the teenager I was...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleolithic_Continuity_Theory
Just a small sampling of some of the words and phrases handed down from that Ice Age era language...
Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrr
Damn! It's fucking cold!
I'm freezing my (nuts/dick/balls/ass/tits) off.
When the fuck is Summer going to finally get here?
When the hell will central heating systems be invented?
This space unintentionally left blank.
This reminds me of the thing a week or two back about how a graph of DNA complexity hits the time "creation of Earth" at quite some complexity, leading to the idea that evolution of DNA began before the Earth was created.
Complex things must evolve over some time, but our theories are full of arbitrary cutoff points where we assume it "began". But those cutoff points aren't necessarily possible as ground zero. Assuming life began on Earth leads to problems with the rate of evolution not being enough to create it, and fixes for those problems. But maybe the fix is just to drop the last remnants of Biblical Earth-is-special thinking (why would we assume life began on Earth in the first place?)
In terms of homo sapiens, if we assume this species is the one to form language, why would anyone assume it didn't form language until some time after it dissipated over the planet? Why wouldn't we think that there may be common ancestor words from the time of the first handful of sapiens? As every parent knows, speaking is innate but reading & writing must be taught. So there is surely tens of thousands of years of spoken-only communication with no record at all, other than vestigal remains in modern languages.
Perhaps if we study the rate of evolution of languages we will also discover that there wasn't time to evolve modern languages unless it started as soon as homo sapiens was born.
Exactly! Who cares how people communicate? How is that at all important in any conceivable way?!?
I hate research like this. Impossible to prove impossible to disprove. the whole thing is and I think because x was done x number of years ago in x number of places so it may have been done even further back. It MAY have been but its not provable. I would have to see the whole paper to comment fully but Im skeptical to say the least
Its the same as with archeology in prehistory and stick with a string is a tool, the remains of a fishing rod or our favorite a ritual object. It may just be a child's toy but saying that wont get next years research funded.
Thanks to idiotic ideas such as trickle down economics and mental dwarfs who actually believe Ayn Rand we have even more than receding glaciers and people living by camp fires. Progress since 10,000 years ago might be a lot more limited than most people suspect so it should be no shock that we grumble with similar sounds as the cave dwellers of yesteryear.
And form the department of Wild Speculation, we have the following gem.
I heard they had 50 different words for ice.
What is the deal with the caption on the Tower of Babel in the article in Science News? "Out of one, many. The 'babel' of far-flung languages spoken in Europe and Asia, perhaps resulting from the fall of the Biblical tower, may derive from a single common ancestor."
I though the AAAS was a mainstream scientific organization. Guess they have a prankster on board. Didn't notice it until I read the comments in the article, to give fair credit.
... the word for "no" in almost all european languages regardless of the branch (latin, germanic, slavic) begins with the sound "N" and are all pretty similar. No, nein, nyet, non, ni etc. That can't be a coincidence.
Cave teen: "And then I was like all, ug!, y'know?"
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
Tonda zug-zug Lanaa!
What is happening now, is they are finding cross correlations to accurately date certain mutations. Most people following science, know there is this mutation tree built on Y chromosomes, and mitochondrial DNA have postulated a mitochondrial "Eve" and Y-Chromosome "Adam". There are also the mutation tree on body lice, head lice and other parasites on human body. They too have mutations and they can be correlated with human migrations and contact because many of these parasites can not live without human contact and they spread only on close contact. Dogs are our symbiotic species, and their DNA and mutations could be tracked. Lactose tolerance among us, which started just 6000 years ago, genetics of domesticated plants and animals etc are all providing huge mutation trees and they have events that could be used to do accurate dating.
This is pushing the inferences in linguistics to one more boundary. Earlier linguists by themselves could take these mutation trees in languages to some 5000 years or 8000 years. Beyond that the noise was too much. Now with independent information about which people migrated where and when, they are able to push it beyond 8000 years to 16000 years. Just plain steady progress. This jump happens to cross the ice-age boundary. So there is some opportunity to make a sexier head line involving ice age. That is all.
It is interesting, it is exciting, but hardly a fundamental new break through.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
120 posts and not ONE reference to "gin and tonic". Douglas Adams, we hardly knew ya.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Although, useful English words come from German Ficken.
For example, although about 50% of French and English words derive from a common ancestor (like "mere" and "mother," for example), with English and German the rate is closer to 70%—indicating that while all three languages are related, English and German have a more recent common ancestor.
This ignores historical reality. In England, a Germanic language was spoken before French-speaking people invaded, bringing their Latin-derived and other words with them. The Germanic "ancestry" came first, and a minority of French words were injected more recently.
Words of language do not spread like genes in a population.
I still firmly believe that the English language was actually invented by five German philosophers on a mushroom trip.
All the world's an analog stage, and digital circuits play only bit parts.
But some words, including I, you, here, how, not, and two, are replaced only once every 10,000 or even 20,000 years.
Well, at least I now know enough words to pick up an ice-age woman.
I heard a Stanford linguistics professor John McWhorter suggest that stong verbs in Germanic languages were like semetic verbs: vowels shifts indicate tense and case. He goes a step further and suggests an intermingling of the two cultures sometime around split of germanic from Indo-European. Lots of wild ideas out there.
Presumably, the authors will now allege common ancestry with languages of Oceania and Eastasia.
Then the real wars will begin.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
WATER
written on a tablet in ancient hittite discovered some years back but believed to be nearly 5-6 thousand years old and easily the one word that even means the same thing.....this article is a possibly thing.....
Some people think I am a caveman: awk grep sed cron dd fork
Spoken by Neanderthals
Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers
"Ooh boy, this one's largely a doozy, as they say.
One major gripe is that that the researchers assume that the more frequent an item is used, the more conservative it tends to be over time. However, in recent discourse studies, the trend is exactly the opposite: the more frequent an item is, the more likely it will change substantially, e.g., vowel reduction, cluster simplification, and so on. It will tend to show *more* phonetic alteration, especially with other items that co-occur with the word in question.
Second, why are they taking modern cognates as their bases for comparison? Again, this all hangs on their assumption that more frequent items are more conservative, which is quite misinformed - and tautological at this point. They should at least compare cognates that have been reconstructed, either through sister languages or internally reconstructed (in the cases of isolates).
Third, the Eurasiatic homeland is one HONKIN' LAND MASS, which makes extensive and prolonged language contact not only possible, but very likely. We can't afford to make any assumptions that these cognates were "conservative" in any significant way because of this major possibility. The researchers don't even acknowledge this as a possible complicating factor in the third paragraph - but for me, this is about the biggest elephant in the room."
These words all have cognate class size of 4 or more, "defined as the number (of seven) of Eurasiatic language families that are reconstructed as cognate for the word used to convey the meaning shown."
Thou
I
Not
What
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
Interestingly, Japanese chichi can also mean "teats, breasts; mother's milk". So in some ways, chichi *does* mean "mother".
(Japanese is rife with homophones.)
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
FIRE BAD! GLORG SAD!
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
Also Cantonese seems to use a word like diem to refer to time.
Another false cognate, I'm afraid.
The closest I can find to your diem meaning "time" in Cantonese is dim (see http://www.cantonese.sheik.co.uk/dictionary/search/?searchtype=4&text=time). This dim actually comes from the word for "point", and is used not for "time" in general, but in set expressions like gei dim "what time", literally meaning "what point (on the clock)", or zung dim "hour, on the hour", literally meaning "chime point (on the clock)" > "the point on the clock when the bells chime" > "on the hour".
Consequently, it can be pretty quickly demonstrated that Cantonese dim and Latin diem ("day") have exactly schmotz to do with each other. :)
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
But at what point in history did Czechoslovakia sell all its vowels to France?
Table-ized A.I.
I guess it's been long enough that glottochronology is being rediscovered. Just looking at the list of "ultraconservative" words (I, you, here, how, not, and two) supposedly replaced every 10,000 years or more, I can tell at a glance that at least half have been replaced fully within Japanese in the last 1000 years alone and another replaced by a loanword. Those words are more conservative in Indo-European, but generalizing from "conservative in Indo-European" to "conservative in all languages" doesn't work in practice.
French is "oui" , not "si". "Si" in french means "if".
Yes. No news there.
What would apparently be news is that French oui comes from Latin hoc + Latin ille, "for this reason, that", semantically similar to the derivation of Spanish sí from Latin sic, "such, thus, so" -- both basically mean "yeah, what you said."
Basically, the words for "yes" in the various European languages are more recent developments, hence the greater variety.
Interestingly, the different ways of saying "yes" in the completely unrelated Japanese language show a similar historical derivation from words originally meaning "what you said, just like that", suggesting that this kind of semantic development is relatively common among humans in general.
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
Typical bullshit science. How to detect it? Very easy: if there is a phrase "million years" in it (in this case "ten thousand years"), then it's bullshit.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
I still firmly believe that the English language was actually invented by five German philosophers on a mushroom trip.
So is that the start of the Anglo-Saxon invasion of the British Isles? I never knew!
:-P
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
My analysis is that to spit was conserved because it is an onomatopoeia or onomatopia for you picky Brits.
Some of the other words are not much more than ma, ba, da, etc., the sounds that babies make, which form the cognitive basis for all languages. Some Google sleuthing will reward you with some interesting papers on this.
But some words, including I, you, here, how, not, and two, are replaced only once every 10,000 or even 20,000 years.
I wonder how they arrive at that conclusion, given that "you" just replaced "thou" less than 500 years ago, and "me" has been emerging as a strong form for "I" even more recently. In other languages you have clusters like tú/vos/usted for "you" that are regionally shifting in a matter of decades.
I thought Evil Dead removed the shelf life limit on "Groovy", permanently.
Give me some sugar, baby!
Japanese is rife with homophones
Really? I thought it was quite a gay-friendly culture?
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Japanese is rife with homophones
Really? I thought it was quite a gay-friendly culture?
Ba, dum!
Seriously, though, Japan has its issues. "Gay" is okay in certain overt contexts, but more in the way that Liberace was okay -- it's for show, it's funny, it's extravagant, it's entertaining. Gay as a real lifestyle, though, still faces a lot of discrimination and potential for violence. I gather from friends and from living there for several years that being out of the closet is not common for Japanese folks living in Japan. The rules are different for foreigners, so gay gaijin have a relatively easier time of it. (Easier relative to Japanese people, not necessarily relative to their home countries.)
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
15,000 years ago ...
Linguistic expert: And what is your name?
Primative man: I Ug!
Linguistic expert: That can't be right, Apple have a trademark on that!
Sure enough, the cow costume was hanging up next to the superhero outfit and sailors uniform. (S,Spud)
Don't tell Al Gore, but the Earth is still in an Ice Age. During this Ice Age, the ice has advanced and receded twenty times. A betting person would bet on the pattern, expecting the ice will advance again. Not to worry, there are currently 203,000 homes for sale in Florida, although on a first-come basis.
I got an exemplar of the whole study. It is a very interesting reading.
Here is an example of these ancient words:
Yi-nash-Yog-Sothoth-he-lgeb-fi-throdog-Yah!
What I wonder is why the authors have vanished in such a mysterious way...
-- 29A the number of the Beast
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4612