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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
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.
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,
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
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
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.
Lord Renfrew may be a respected archaeologist, but his views on historical linguistics are rejected by most of the field.
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!
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"?
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.