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."

Comments

Words in common - Thai and English

[IntentionalStance]

I'll do my best to render Thai words phonetically but it's not easy.

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

Re:Words in common - Thai and English

[sidevans]

Thai is a bit weird too...

Moo = Pork (not Cow)
Men = Smells Bad / Foul

And its the year 2556 in Thailand, what happens if a starship lands there and asks the date, they will think they are in a time distortion, its all very confusing.

Sometimes I wonder if they are just fucking with us for the fun of it, either way I keep going back there...

Re:Words in common - Thai and English

[CRCulver]

Sounds a bit of a stretch to me - relatively isolated communities like the Japanese say haha and chichi for mother and father

As I posted further down, Modern Japanese haha and chichi go back to the bog-standard babble forms *papa and *titi in Old Japanese, and the sound changes that produced the Modern Japanese forms happened relatively recently when the Japanese language can not be said to have been isolated.

(The word for father still survives as titi dialectally.)

Re:Pics or it didn't

[MiniMike]

Or give us the Iceageish translation for "Jeez, it's cold out there."

"Good morning"?