Linguists identify 15,000-year-old ‘ultraconserved words’
Graphic: Hear and see the pronunciation of words from their ancient language familiesBy David Brown, Tuesday, May 7, 12:30 AM
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 Asia in any one of hundreds of modern languages, there is a chance they would understand at least some of 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 retreated at the end of the last Ice Age. Those few words mean the same thing, and sound almost the same, as they did then.
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 drive ancient words to extinction, just like the dinosaurs of the Jurassic era.
A new study, however, suggests that’s not always true.
A team of researchers has come up with a list of two dozen “ultraconserved words” that have survived 150 centuries. It includes some predictable entries: “mother,” “not,” “what,” “to hear” and “man.” It also contains surprises: “to flow,” “ashes” and “worm.”
The existence of the long-lived words suggests there was a “proto-Eurasiatic” language that was the common ancestor to about 700 contemporary languages that are the native tongues of more than half the world’s people.
“We’ve never heard this language, and it’s not written down anywhere,” said Mark Pagel, an evolutionary theorist at the University of Reading in England who headed the study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “But this ancestral language was spoken and heard. People sitting around campfires used it to talk to each other.”
In all, “proto-Eurasiatic” gave birth to seven language families. Several of the world’s important language families, however, fall outside that lineage, such as the one that includes Chinese and Tibetan; several African language families, and those of American Indians and Australian aborigines.
That a spoken sound carrying a specific meaning could remain unchanged over 15,000 years is a controversial idea for most historical linguists.
“Their general view is pessimistic,” said William Croft, a professor of linguistics at the University of New Mexico who studies the evolution of language and was not involved in the study. “They basically think there’s too little evidence to even propose a family like Eurasiatic.” In Croft’s view, however, the new study supports the plausibility of an ancestral language whose audible relics cross tongues today.
Pagel and three collaborators studied “cognates,” which are words that have the same meaning and a similar sound in different languages. Father (English), padre (Italian), pere (French), pater (Latin) and pitar (Sanskrit) are cognates. Those words, however, are from languages in one family, the Indo-European. The researchers looked much further afield, examining seven language families in all.
In addition to Indo-European, the language families included Altaic (whose modern members include Turkish, Uzbek and Mongolian); Chukchi-Kamchatkan (languages of far northeastern Siberia); Dravidian (languages of south India); Inuit-Yupik (Arctic languages); Kartvelian (Georgian and three related languages) and Uralic (Finnish, Hungarian and a few others).
They make up a diverse group. Some don’t use the Roman alphabet. Some had no written form until modern times. They sound different to the untrained ear. Their speakers live thousands of miles apart. In short, they seem unlikely candidates to share cognates.
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Pagel’s team used as its starting material 200 words that linguists know to be the core vocabulary of all languages.
Other researchers had searched for cognates of those words in members of each of the seven Eurasiatic language families. They looked, for example, for similar-sounding words for “fish” or “to drink” in the Altaic family of languages or in the Indo-European languages. When they found cognates, they constructed what they imagined were the cognates’ ancestral words — a task that requires knowing how sounds change between languages, such as “f” in Germanic languages becoming “p” in Romance languages.
Those made-up words are called “proto-words.” Pagel’s team compared them among language families. They made thousands of comparisons, asking such questions as: Do the proto-word for “hand” in the Inuit-Yupik language family and the proto-word for “hand” in the Indo-European language family sound similar?
Surprisingly, the answer to that question and many others was yes.
The 23 entries on the list of ultraconserved words are cognates in four or more language families. Could they sound the same purely by chance? Pagel and his colleagues think not.
Linguists have calculated the rate at which words are replaced in a language. Common ones disappear the slowest. It’s those words that Pagel’s team found were most likely to have cognates among the seven families.
In fact, they calculated that words uttered at least 16 times per day by an average speaker had the greatest chance of being cognates in at least three language families. If chance had been the explanation, some rarely used words would have ended up on the list. But they didn’t.
As a group, the ultraconserved words give a hint of what has been important to people over the millennia.
“I was really delighted to see ‘to give’ there,” Pagel said. “Human society is characterized by a degree of cooperation and reciprocity that you simply don’t see in any other animal. Verbs tend to change fairly quickly, but that one hasn’t.”
Of course, one has to explain the presence of “bark.”
“I have spoken to some anthropologists about that, and they say that bark played a very significant role in the lives of forest-dwelling hunter-gatherers,” Pagel said. Bark was woven into baskets, stripped and braided into rope, burned as fuel, stuffed in empty spaces for insulation and consumed as medicine.
“To spit” is also a surprising survivor. It may be that the sound of that word is just so expressive of the sound of the activity — what linguists call “onomatopoeia” — that it simply couldn’t be improved on over 15,000 years.
As to the origin of the sound of the other ultraconserved words, and who made them up, that’s a question best left to the poets.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/linguists-identify-15000-year-old-ultraconserved-words/2013/05/06/a02e3a14-b427-11e2-9a98-4be1688d7d84_story.html?tid=ts_carousel
Words that last
By Wilson Andrews and David Brown, Published: May 6, 2013
A research team led by Mark Pagel at the University of Reading in England has identified 23 “ultraconserved words” that have remained largely unchanged for 15,000 years. Words that sound and mean the same thing in different languages are called “cognates”. These are five words that have cognates in at least four of the seven Eurasiatic language families. Those languages, about 700 in all, are spoken in an area extending from the British Isles to western China and from the Arctic to southern India. Only one word, “thou” (the singular form of “you”), has a cognate in all seven families.
Voiced by Rebecca Béatrice Grollemund, a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Reading.
All 23 “ultraconserved words”
Listed by the number of language families in which they have cognates. Click here to learn more about this research.
7 - thou
6 - I
5 - not, that, we, to give, who
4 - this, what, man/male, ye, old, mother, to hear, hand, fire ,to pull, black, to flow, bark, ashes, to spit, worm
SOURCE: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/national/words-that-last/
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Comments
NullPointer
1:23 AM GMT+0530
That sentence is so simple even a caveman can understand it.
Splunge
2:17 AM GMT+0530
You win.
Rush_Limbaughs_Forehead
4:00 AM GMT+0530
Huh? How can this be possible? The creationists told me the Earth is only 6,000 years old.
Sarpedon
6:45 PM GMT+0530
This article is very confused and misleading. As someone else wrote:
"the authors are reporting the results of an experiment with a statistical algorithm. They are not making any assertions about what actually happened in deep prehistory, just a way of making predictions about what may have happened."
This is correct, and the underlying assumption--that "words will evolve in other language families at rates similar to those found in the Indo-European languages, with frequency of word-use acting as the common causal factor..." is a hypothesis that has been kicking around for about 70 years (the technical term is "glottochronology", associated with the linguist Morris Swadesh) but is still controversial for a number of reasons.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morris_Swadesh
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glottochronology
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dfoster2
6:39 PM GMT+0530
Caveman F-bomb found yet?
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exmptle
6:35 PM GMT+0530
When I was in high school, the wiseguys would integrate the word B-S with a muffled sneeze. It was the first thing that popped into my mind after reading this article. These people need to do something more useful. Why not add some more words to the Klingon language?
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gspanos441
6:11 PM GMT+0530
Interesting that 'I' is on the list because the Chinese word 'wo' falls outside the proposed proto-Euroasiatic family and sounds a lot like the Greek 'ego,' the Italian 'io,' the Spanish 'yo,' and, of course, the English 'I.'
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OldDad
6:05 PM GMT+0530
"Mama" "Dada" "Nana/Oma" "because I said so" and "turn it off!"
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LaylaS03
5:50 PM GMT+0530
Awesome, dude.
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LouisianaVirginian
5:49 PM GMT+0530
I can think of quite a number of "modern" words to describe this effort at understanding ancient and modern language. The "results" and conclusions drawn from this study remind me of the archaeologist that finds a single brown pot shard and from that piece of pottery can conceive of an entire scene of early humans...complete with facial expressions, hair styles, clothing adornment, shelter construction and ornamentation, children playing with pets and toys, and even the weather...you can see their artistic output in any museum. This is nothing more than the multi-year product of over-funded project by a group of hyper-stimulated imaginers pushing out some "result" to maintain funding for their future pipe dreams.
And further...sound recording is about 100 years old (think Thomas Edison here)...and sound "printing" and analysis are less than 50 years old. Where, oh where, is the baseline sound information on a word theoretically spoken 15,000 years ago. One would need the baseline recording to make any meaningful judgment as to the similarities...or dissimilarities...in any oral pronounciation.
Here's a word for the scientists...HOGWASH...and the concept it conveys is common across the face of the planet...and it has many derivatives and synonymns...but I won't type them here so as to not offend any readers.
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LaylaS03
5:51 PM GMT+0530
You're a linguist, I assume, so you've studied this? No, you're an anti-science Republican who believes the Earth is 5,000 years old.
LikeLiked by 5 readers · Flag
Sarpedon
6:16 PM GMT+0530
No need for creationist "science" here. Linguists who have studied this come to the same conclusion: hogwash.
LikeLiked by 1 reader · Flag
exmptle
6:42 PM GMT+0530
Well said L-V!! I'm baffled at how Layla and the "likes" can turn your comments into a religious/political issue.
Like · Flag
Darkmirror
5:41 PM GMT+0530
We can't assume more than what's been observed: for example, maybe there was no difference then between nouns and verbs. So "bark" might refer to how dogs seem to speak, as in "hear the bark" or "it barks," rather than to trees. At least this is how phenomenology might approach this discovery.
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PeterDM
5:35 PM GMT+0530
From ancient Nordic languages, we get the phrase, "Kiww the wabbit!"
LikeLiked by 3 readers · Reply · Share · Flag
LarsX
5:29 PM GMT+0530
A very interesting article on lingusitics. Now let's see how many people can work an attack on Obama into their responses.
LikeLiked by 6 readers · Reply · Share · Flag
NumeroUnoHombre
5:49 PM GMT+0530
Awesome! Made me smile. The rabid right doth froth at the mouth. But I also have to point out that you brought the subject of Mr. President up!
LikeLiked by 2 readers · Flag
Geezer4
6:07 PM GMT+0530
Hombre, It's more a comment on the ways of the Commentariat. Instead of Obama, they could have scribbled Liberals, Tea-Partiers, Marxists or any number of other off the subject and off-the-wall projections of their personal warps.
Like · Flag
PeterDM
5:27 PM GMT+0530
The article mentioned how the F in Germanic words gets changed to P in Romance langages... People in the Philipines often pronounce the F as P. Surely this must be significant.
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Sarpedon
6:26 PM GMT+0530
It was the other way around. Proto-Indo-European /p/, reflected in Latin pater and its Romance offshoots, Greek pater, and other languages, changed to /f/ in the Germanic languages in certain situations. This unique development of the Germanic languages is part of the series of sound changes that are known as "Grimm's Law", after one of the Grimm brothers (of fairy tale fame), who was among the first to figure it out. Both /p/ and /f/ are labial consonants, i.e., they are articulated with the lip. In a language such as Tagalog with no /f/ sound, /f/ in foreign words tends to be assimilated to the nearest sound in the language, which would be /p/.
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deeman
5:20 PM GMT+0530
I bet the words "gov't stupidity" outlast them all.
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rjb52b
5:14 PM GMT+0530
There is one phrase that has endured for eons with no mention in the article. It is quite familar and universal to all around the world. It is the reference to ones middle finger. I'm sure there are many recordings of it going back to the dawn of man.
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edbaker2
5:09 PM GMT+0530
AHHH !!! I just read those "words" written on Neolithics' cave dwelling walls 35,000 years ago.
our computer/scientific Modern Ways sure do dumb-things-down.... I bet some grad students
will do their thesis's on this theoretical, accidental, conjunctive "stuff" ...
and
OF CORSE Cavemen communicated with each other.... just look at Tarzan ... he knew pretty quickly the basic words and gestures to "get Jane" ...
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vzepijdu
6:23 PM GMT+0530
Ug Un gowa
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meadowrock
4:43 PM GMT+0530
Verbs tend to fade out. The verb 'to give' has remained. With the Tea Party around today, the verb 'to give' may be on the way out. Hopefully, the Tea Party is on the way out instead, with the verb 'to take'.
Ultraconserved words point to deep language ancestry across Eurasia
Mark Pagela,b,1, Quentin D. Atkinsonc, Andreea S. Caluded, and Andrew Meadea
Author Affiliations
Edited* by Colin Renfrew, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom, and approved April 15, 2013 (received for review October 31, 2012)
Abstract
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.
cultural evolution phylogeny historical linguistics
Footnotes
1To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: m.pagel@reading.ac.uk.
Author contributions: M.P., Q.D.A., A.S.C., and A.M. performed research; M.P. and A.M. contributed new reagents/analytic tools; M.P., Q.D.A., A.S.C., and A.M. analyzed data; and M.P., Q.D.A., and A.S.C. wrote the paper.
The authors declare no conflict of interest.
*This Direct Submission article had a prearranged editor.
This article contains supporting information online at www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi:10.1073/pnas.1218726110/-/DCSupplemental.
Published online before print May 6, 2013, doi: 10.1073/pnas.1218726110
PNAS May 6, 2013
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Supporting Information
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http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2013/05/01/1218726110
Ultraconserved words point to deep language ancestry across Eurasia
Supporting Information
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