Linguists identify 15,000-year-old ‘ultraconserved words’

[n2doc]

By David Brown, Updated: Monday, May 6, 3:00 PM

You, hear me! Give this fire to that old man. Pull the black worm off the bark and give it to the mother. And no spitting in the ashes!

It’s an odd little speech. But if it were spoken clearly to a band of hunter-gatherers in the Caucasus 15,000 years ago, there’s a good chance the listeners would know what you were saying.

That’s because all of the nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs in the four sentences are words that have descended largely unchanged from a language that died out as the glaciers were retreating at the end of the last Ice Age.

The traditional view is that words can’t survive for more than 8,000 to 9,000 years. Evolution, linguistic “weathering” and the adoption of replacements from other languages eventually drives ancient words to extinction, just like the dinosaurs of the Jurassic era.

more
http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/linguists-identify-15000-year-old-ultraconserved-words/2013/05/06/a02e3a14-b427-11e2-9a98-4be1688d7d84_story.html

[arcane1]

1. I love this stuff.

Thanks for posting!

[haikugal]

2. Fascinating!

Thanks for this...

[Scuba]

3. Very cool, thanks for posting.

[MisterP]

4. ei!

http://starling.rinet.ru/cgi-bin/main.cgi?root=config

[hunter]

11. Interesting link that. I could spend hours chasing words there.

I'm always a little reluctant to click on "ru" links, but that is a very nice language database.

[niyad]

5. k and r--thank you so much for posting this--sending it to all my sister and brother word freaks.

[jimlup]

6. A sort of unrelated personal observation...

I was in Munich Germany for New Years Eve in 2006 and some idiot shot a rocket (firework) right at me. I totally went off on him in English because I was just smoking angry (justifiably so!)

I'm certain he and everyone in the crowd around me understood every word exactly as I was saying it despite not knowing English.

[JDPriestly]

19. Kids in Germany learn English pretty early on. So many in the group may have understood

what you were saying because they know a little English.

It's Americans who don't know languages other than their own.

[jimlup]

20. Yeah but my point is that

"God Damn it!" "What the HELL DO YOU THINK YOU ARE DOING!"

is pretty universal.

Actually, I found German fascinating. Even though I've had very limited instruction in it I found learning simple conversation fairly natural.

[JDPriestly]

21. I found German to be pretty natural too.

[ChazInAz]

7. Beowulf

Whilst listening to a modern Bard perform "Beowulf" in the original Anglo-Saxon, I was amazed to hear the expression "drunk with beer", meaning and pronunciation obviously unchanged in a Millennium.

[struggle4progress]

10. Don't mess with the basics!

[srican69]

8. its all humbug isn't it....how can words be 15000 years old when

Our universe is just 5000 years old... these scientist I tell you....

[Spitfire of ATJ]

9. Long live "fuck"!

So many meanings,...it's like "Aloha".

[muriel_volestrangler]

12. If anyone wants to read the full paper, it's available for free

here: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2013/05/01/1218726110.full.pdf+html

Their hypothesis for how the families branched from the common 'ancestor' is:
Dravidian (southern India) about 14,500 years ago
Kartvelian (Caucasus) about 13,000 years ago (though possibly that should be earlier)
Uralic (eg Finnish) and Indo-European about 12,000 years ago, the 2 then splitting from each other about 11,500 years ago
Altaic (eg Turkish) about 11,000 years ago
Chukchi-Kamchatkan and Inuit-Yupik split about 10,500 years ago

[fleur-de-lisa]

13. Neat . . . thanks for posting!

I've always been fascinated by linguistics.

[formercia]

14. Cunning Linguists

IMHO.

[FlaGranny]

16. You're bad!

[formercia]

17. Pray tell......

[Ichingcarpenter]

15. Map of the languages and connections

Map showing approximate regions where languages from the seven Eurasiatic language families are spoken. The color-shaded areas should be treated as suggestive only, as current language rangeswill not necessarily correspond to original homelands, and language boundaries will often overlap. For example, the Indo-European language Swedish is spoken along with the Uralic Finnish in southern Finland. 10

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-05-linguist-core-group-words-survived.html#jCp

[AnneD]

18. Sounds like conversation...

around the stone age dinner table to me.

[greiner3]

22. I'm wondering;

If Noam Chomsky had a hand in the paper and analysis.