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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.
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
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...
1. Mindfullness
2. Coexist
3. Tolerance
4. Inclusiveness
5. Redistribution
There will be a quiz when Progress has returned us to that http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noble_savage state.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
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,
This is a pretty lame summary. If there are words preserved from the Ice Age, list like five of them!
Or give us the Iceageish translation for "Jeez, it's cold out there."
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
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
As long as there are still polar ice sheets, the ice age hasn't ended.
Unga bunga
That has evolved to cowabunga. We conclude that 'ung' is the ancient word for cow.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Brrrrrr....
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.
"It is a curious fact, and one to which no one knows quite how much importance to attach, that something like 85% of all known worlds in the Galaxy, be they primitive or highly advanced, have invented a drink called jynnan tonnyx, or gee-N'N-T'N-ix, or jinond-o-nicks, or any one of a thousand or more variations on the same phonetic theme. The drinks themselves are not the same, and vary between the Sivolvian "chinanto/mnigs" which is ordinary water served at slightly above room temperature, and the Gagrakackan "tzjin-anthony-ks" which kills cows at a hundred paces; and in fact the one common factor between all of them, beyond the fact that the names sound the same, is that they were all invented and named before the worlds concerned made contact with any other worlds.
Not at all. For one, the reconstructed word for "fire" in Proto-Indo-European began with *p-. The shift to f- was a development specific to the Germanic languages. In other languages the sound changed in other ways (Celtic languages lost initial p- entirely, for instance). If sound change can go in so many directions, then "cognition" doesn't predetermine the shape of a word.
Since Saussure's discovery of l'arbitraire du signe over a century ago, it has been understood that the word for a concept can take pretty much any form. Yes, there are limited examples of sound symbolism, but this does not apply for the lexicon in general.
Unga bunga
That has evolved to cowabunga. We conclude that 'ung' is the ancient word for cow.
And 'bung' is an ancient word meaning 'desire to have sex with' adding the 'a' makes the word plural.
This article says nothing against languages moving to new territories. It merely claims that they are related and preserve common lexicon.
What? My mother was a saint!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
"This is a pretty lame summary. If there are words preserved from the Ice Age, list like five of them!"
From the Ice Age?
'Climate' and 'Change' comes to mind.
Ever since they disbanded the office of the Devil's Advocate in the Vatican, everybody and their circus of performing poodles has been getting sainthood granted. It's a shame: being the official Catholic Church's lawyer for Satan, there to cast doubt on the claims of sainthood was not only the coolest job I could imagine, but should have been staffed by James Randi or one of his students.
It was traditionally staffed by Jesuits, so I suppose that's close enough.
Those are all Indo-European languages. This article is about connections to to central, northern and eastern Asia. And Alaska!
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.
Or give us the Iceageish translation for "Jeez, it's cold out there."
"Good morning"?
The words "cota" (geezer) and "bué" (a lot) come from Angola, and were adopted by the Portuguese youth. The equivalents in Brazilian slang could be "coroa" (geezer) and "à beça" or "pa chuchu" (a lot).
Funny, this is all Portuguese. Languages are cool!
Some people think I am a caveman: awk grep sed cron dd fork
How could you tell it was Portuguese?
I don't know Portuguese. But if it looks like Spanish, but doesn't have many Spanish words, it's probably Portuguese. I'm honestly surprised that Slashdot can even handle that many accent marks.