Ice Age language may share words with modern tongues
US: Our Ice Age ancestors in Europe, 15,000 years ago, may have used
words we would recognize today, according to a new study out this week
in a US journal.
Words that sound alike in related languages are generally assumed to
have come from a common route, like "father" in English and "pater" in
Latin.
Lead author Mark Pagel, an evolutionary biologist at the University
of Reading in Britain, and his team were able to take the analysis a
step further by showing that certain very commonly used words, like
pronouns, are more likely to stay the same over the millennia "We
discovered numerals, pronouns and special adverbs are replaced far more
slowly, with linguistic half-lives of once every 10,000 or even more
years." Pagel explained.
In other words, everyday words like "I, you, we, man and bark," have,
in certain languages, the same meaning and nearly the same sound as they
did thousands of years ago.
Their analysis suggests that at least seven major language families
in Eurasia all descended from a common ancestor language.
"As a rule of thumb, words used more than about once per thousand in
everyday speech were seven to ten times more likely to show deep
ancestry in the Eurasian super-family," Pagel said. Focusing on these
common lexical items helped the British researchers avoid a common
pitfall of historical linguistics -- that it is difficult to distinguish
between words that sound alike because of common ancestry and words that
sound alike because of simple coincidence.
For instance, "team" and "cream" in English are unrelated, but sound
quite similar.
AFP
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