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 you went back 15,000 years and spoke these words to hunter-gatherers in Eurasia in any one of hundreds of modern languages, there is a chance they would understand at least some of what you were saying.
Read more at The Washington Post
Ultraconserved words (cognates present in 4 or more language families, ranked from most to least conserved):
- Thou
- I
- Not
- That
- We
- To give
- Who
- This
- What
- Man/male
- Ye
- Old
- Mother
- To hear
- Hand
- Fire
- To pull
- Black
- To flow
- Bark
- Ashes
- To spit
- Worm
Read the original research article
The search for ever deeper relationships among the World’s languages is bedeviled by the fact that most words evolve too rapidly to preserve evidence of their ancestry beyond 5,000 to 9,000 y.
On the other hand, quantitative modeling indicates that some “ultraconserved” words exist that might be used to find evidence for deep linguistic relationships beyond that time barrier.
Here we use a statistical model, which takes into account the frequency with which words are used in common everyday speech, to predict the existence of a set of such highly conserved words among seven language families of Eurasia postulated to form a linguistic superfamily that evolved from a common ancestor around 15,000 y ago.
We derive a dated phylogenetic tree of this proposed superfamily with a time-depth of ∼14,450 y, implying that some frequently used words have been retained in related forms since the end of the last ice age. Words used more than once per 1,000 in everyday speech were 7- to 10-times more likely to show deep ancestry on this tree.
Our results suggest a remarkable fidelity in the transmission of some words and give theoretical justification to the search for features of language that might be preserved across wide spans of time and geography. (1)
1.
Pagel M, Atkinson QD, S. Calude A, Meade A. Ultraconserved words point to deep language ancestry across Eurasia. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA. 2013 May 21;110(21):8471.
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