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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."
Colin Renfrew, the editor of the paper is a highly respected linguist so I wouldn't dismiss it lightly. The article however, is very, very short on detail. I was also rather disappointed.
Historical linguists basically laughed Renfrew out of town for his 1987 "out of Anatolia" hypothesis about Indo-European origins.
Also, he is an archaeologist, not a linguist. IMO archeologists know exactly diddly about historical linguistics, and reveal it almost every time they say anything on the topic.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Lord Renfrew may be a respected archaeologist, but his views on historical linguistics are rejected by most of the field.
Modern Japanese chi- goes back to Old Japanese *ti-, thus the earlier form of the word was titi. Again, a standard babble word. If Japanese looks exotic, it is due to sound changes that are only a few centuries old (and which happened at the same time as a massive influx of Sinitic loanwords, so they were hardly an isolated people).
I'd really suggest picking up a Japanese historical grammar before asking more. These things are pretty elementary for students of Japanese.
Why should they? chichi means "father" after all, not "mama", and it is quite common for words meaning "father" to begin with a dental stop (whether voiced or unvoiced). As I said, the original titi, which is comparable to English daddy, survives among Japanese dialects, and the affricatization of t- to chi- before high vowels in the standard language is a recent development. As I mentioned before, please read more about the history of Japanese before thinking that you are so clever.
In Norwegian, the word for mother is "vinglefitte". It goes to show that not all languages follow this pattern.
So why do online dictionaries say that the Norwegian word for mother is "mor" - e.g. http://www.norwegianword.com/1/mother
I am anarch of all I survey.
Those are all Indo-European languages. This article is about connections to to central, northern and eastern Asia. And Alaska!
In Norwegian, the word for mother is "vinglefitte". It goes to show that not all languages follow this pattern.
So why do online dictionaries say that the Norwegian word for mother is "mor" - e.g. http://www.norwegianword.com/1/mother
vinglefitte means something like sloppy p***y