Ultraconserved words in use since the last Ice Age

http://www.dailygrail.com/Hidden-History/2017/5/Study-Uncovered-Common-Words-Appear-Have-Survived-Mother-Language-Existed

by blacksqr • 9 years ago

128 101 9 years ago

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rabboRubble6• 9 years ago

I really like the word "tea" across languages.

Japanese - cha

Chinese - chá

Thailand - chā

Russian - чай (chay)

Turkish - Çay (chai)

Sri Lanka Sinhala - තේ (tē)

Arabic - شاي (shay)

German - tee

English - tea!

You have to go out of your way to find a language where "tea" deviates from those patterns.

eridius• 9 years ago

Korean - 차 (cha)

interfixus• 9 years ago

Yes, the absurdity of the package in my cupboard, claiming to contain "chai tea". But your list is a latter-day pattern, the word exported from China together with the product itself.

trynumber9• 9 years ago

But that's because the Europeans all adopted the word later.

From etymology online:

The distribution of the different forms of the word in Europe reflects the spread of use of the beverage. The modern English form, along with French thé, Spanish te, German Tee, etc., derive via Dutch thee from the Amoy form, reflecting the role of the Dutch as the chief importers of the leaves (through the Dutch East India Company, from 1610). Meanwhile, Russian chai, Persian cha, Greek tsai, Arabic shay, and Turkish çay all came overland from the Mandarin form.

rabboRubble6• 9 years ago

Yeah, you are right on with that observation. You prompted me to find out from where the VOC imported their tea. Apparently the initial source was Macao which spoke Cantonese. In modern day Canton and Putonghua words for tea are near indisguishable, so perhaps the Cantonese word for tea circa 1600 was quite like the current Putonhua word for tea. Had VOC sourced their tea from Sri Lanka, our word for tea might be dramatically different. In Tamil, tea is called தேநீர் (tēnīr)

http://www.mightyleaftea.be/history-of-tea?___store=uk&___fr...

edit: tea not teat

icebraining• 9 years ago

Interestingly, we the Portuguese are the exception, using Chá despite being at the Western extreme of the continent: http://i.imgur.com/M4vrWr1.png

Which probably means we got it earlier thanks to our trips to India and China in the 1500s, but then failed to capitalize on its sale to the rest of Europe.

jacobolus3• 9 years ago

As common words go, this one isn’t that old though. Dates from the late 1st millennium, and has mostly been spread around in the past 500 years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etymology_of_tea

I think it’s similar with other products originating largely from a single source, e.g. “chocolate”, “ramen”, “tofu”, “wine”, “cashmere”, “curry”, “khaki”, “shampoo”, ...

ajross2• 9 years ago

But nothing is that simple. Chocolate got mixed up, for example. It's an aztec compound word for the drink made from the plant (xocolatl == "bitter water", per wikipedia). The original term for the plant itself in the sense we use it was the unrelated mayan word cacao.

avz• 9 years ago

You have to go out of your way to find a language where "tea" deviates from those patterns.

Well, there you go:

Lithuanian: arbata, https://translate.google.com/#en/lt/tea

Polish: herbata, https://translate.google.com/#en/pl/tea

Aymara: pulu, https://ay.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulu

iagooar2• 9 years ago

Yet in Polish the word "czaj" also exists and it means a very strong tea.

Herbata seems to come from Latin, as it relates to herbs.

pbhjpbhj4• 9 years ago

I'd never heard of the native South American language Aymara - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aymara_language.

It seems fair to say a language with c. 3M speakers is "going out of one's way" though.

Presumably (all?) other native American languages have words for steeped drinks not derived from "tea" too.

FWIW, especially in North England, en-gb has the word "brew" for a hot, steeped, drink (http://etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&search=br...) which predates the bringing of tea to the UK.

lacampbell3• 9 years ago

They all derive from two sources

Mandarin - chá

Hokkien - tê

rabboRubble6• 9 years ago

Very cool about the Hokkien angle. I have near zero exposure to Hokkien and didn't realize the cha2 / te difference between the 2 dialects. Thank you! I've always been puzzled by the shift from the "ch" to "t" sound as the word migrated westward. I had always attributed the shift to a natural progressive change from language to language. Having two different original sources makes much more sense!

rmetzler• 9 years ago

You should lookup the word for pineapple in other languages. English is the outlier, most (or all, IIRC) call it "ananas".

ino• 9 years ago

Also 'piña' in spanish and 'abacaxi' in brazilian portuguese.

Abacaxi is such a fun word to say out loud.

beagle3• 9 years ago

Similar to Pineapple which is basically "ananas" in every language except English (pineapple) and Spanish (piña); though "ananas" is also accepted, but rarely used, in Spanish, so English stands alone.

[0] https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/134659/why-is-pi...

captainmuon• 9 years ago

Except in Austrian German, where "Ananas" can strangely mean "strawberry" :-)

marcosdumay• 9 years ago

It's "abacaxi" in Brazil, although I guess it's "ananás" in Portugal.

ruste• 9 years ago

Persian - چای (Chai)

hliyan• 9 years ago

Interestingly, it's the British who introduced tea to Sri Lanka, so the Sinhalese word තේ (tē) is an adaptation. So is very possibly the word for pineapple: ananas - annasi (අන්නාසි).

However, the following similarities are probably due to the common roots of Latin and Sanskrit:

English/Latin - Sinhalese

Nose - Naas

Dental - Danta

Three - Three

Regina (Queen) - Regina

There are many others...

Words adapted from Sinhalese to English:

Anaconda - Henakandaya (හෙණකඳයා) (Means "Massive Body")

Sunset• 9 years ago

The Bulgarian form is the same as the russian чай (chay).

mturmon2• 9 years ago

My favorite example of this is the word "squirrel," which is originally from ancient Greek, σκίουρος (lexical translation: skiouros, which means shadow-tailed). Somehow the notion that Socrates would use approximately the same (rather unlikely) word for this animal that I do is fascinating.

rabboRubble6• 9 years ago

My Japanese native language speaker in college had an obsession with the word "squirrel". We spent an entire year trying to teach her how to pronounce it.

Ssss-ka-wuh-rrr-llll

kijin2• 9 years ago

"Squirrel" is in fact a very difficult word to pronounce. Too many consonants squeezed into only two syllables -- sometimes even pronounced as a single syllable -- with a weird diphthong in between.

The ancient Greek version would have been much easier to express in Japanese: su-kyuu-ro-su.

yoodenvranx2• 9 years ago

I am German and 'squirrel' is the one English word I just can't pronounce. I am very good at all the other words, but that one stumps me.

tuukkah• 9 years ago

There's an order-of-magnitude difference here: Ancient Greek was alive 1500 years ago, while the last Ice Age ended 12000 years ago.

TheOtherHobbes• 9 years ago

Interesting etymology. Does that mean the in ancient Greek, squirrels were called "shadow tails"?

I find these explanations a bit baffling. That's a much more sophisticated and metaphorical name than you'd expect.

It would be a bit like calling cats "bird scratchers."

simias• 9 years ago

I'm not sure why it baffles you, this type of "names-by-associations" are pretty common. See "woodpecker", "ladybug", "daddy longlegs", "silverback" etc... Not that different.

Also maybe "shadow" had a slightly different meaning back then or the translation is simply not 100% accurate (are they ever?).

DanAndersen• 9 years ago

For anyone interested in etymology and the endless source of fascinating stories that is language, I recommend The History of English Podcast: http://historyofenglishpodcast.com/

It starts all the way back in Proto-Indo-European and gives a really fulfilling amount of linguistic detail. Some of the most enjoyable parts, IMO, are when you realize that two seemingly-unrelated words are actually cognate.

kijin2• 9 years ago

The article says that words like "fire", "ashes", "bark", and "worm" could be 15K years old, but doesn't provide any idea of how they might have sounded back then. The original paper linked at the bottom doesn't seem to help in that regard, either.

Is this something that we simply cannot know with current methods? Ice Age people obviously didn't leave any sound recordings, but surely some of the sounds would have to be present in a similar form in order for us to say with confidence that a it's the same word?

yorwba• 9 years ago

I think I found an online interface to the database they used: http://starling.rinet.ru/cgi-bin/query.cgi?root=config&morph...

Searching for "fire" gives a bunch of different results; I have no idea which one they used. The one closest to English is probably "*ṗVxwV" (where V stands for any vowel, I believe).

xaedes• 9 years ago

Oh; thank you for the great link! You can even "Select another database"; they have a lot. Nice resource.

Radim2• 9 years ago

The link between a word's length and its "usefulness" is fascinating too. The shorter the word, the more central, fundamental and frequent its use, as a rule of thumb. [0]

One glaring exception is "conscientiousness" -- a personality trait that has been the nr. 1 performance predictor in jobs that require results (execution as opposed to ideas), across time and industries. Clearly central, but 17 characters! O_o

[0] Strauss, Grzybek, Altmann: Word Length and Word Frequency https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-1-4020-4068-...

tempodox• 9 years ago

“conscientiousness” is quite young (stolen from Latin, i.e. when the Romans conquered the world). If it was significant before, it might have been shorter.

mcbits• 9 years ago

Not perfect synonyms, but we do have shorter words in the same semantic ballpark: virtue, vigor, zeal, concern, care, pains...

Radim2• 9 years ago

I'd say the first three are completely off; "concern" & "care" better (I also heard "grit"), but not quite there.

TheCoreh• 9 years ago

So basically words organically developed Huffman coding?

coldtea• 9 years ago

One glaring exception is "conscientiousness" -- a personality trait that has been the nr. 1 performance predictor in jobs that require results (execution as opposed to ideas), across time and industries. Clearly central, but 17 characters!

Central here should be read as "important and used frequently everyday" (which conscientiousness is not at all), not central as in "the notion identified by the word is important in some domain" (besides conscientiousness does not even qualify that much even for this latter criterion).

dancing_shark• 9 years ago

The 23 words from the PNAS paper (Table 1):

  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

http://www.pnas.org/content/110/21/8471/T1.expansion.html

pcrh• 9 years ago

I wonder how many of those would survive multiple hypothesis testing. That is, there are bound to be a number of phonetically similar words that happen to have similar meanings in two different languages. They may not however have common historical roots.

thedailymail• 9 years ago

No idea if this list will stand the test of time, but I tried making some minimal ultra-conserved sentences using all of the words. Lots of pronouns, plus some very specific and limited sets of nouns and verbs make it a fun challenge. [Unlisted words bracketed.]

1) "Hear ye! I, [a] man who[se] hand gives this fire [to] bark. What black ashes! Not thou old mother, that pulls the worm and spits. We flow."

2) "We, man [and] old mother, hand-pull black bark. Worm that spits fire, not ashes, flows. This, what I give ye, thou who hear."

3) "Black, old, male mother pulls worm, not spits fire [or] ashes. I give thou who hear what flows [to] ye."

chch• 9 years ago

Here's a previous thread from when this was originally posted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5669179

I remember, because I made two of my most researched comments there [1]. :)

I'm no historical linguist, but I'd take this finding with a bunch of grains of salt. Eurasiatic language families that seek to combine, say, Proto-Indo-European [2] and Altaic [3] languages are pretty controversial, and in general this paper reeks a bit of glottochronology [4], which is a pretty controversial topic in historical linguistics itself.

Wikipedia's Eurasiatic language page actually even has a large section about this very article, including some refutations[5].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5670947

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Indo-European_language

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altaic_languages

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glottochronology

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurasiatic_languages#Pagel_et_....

jcranmer• 9 years ago

I'm no historical linguist, but I'd take this finding with a bunch of grains of salt. Eurasiatic language families that seek to combine, say, Proto-Indo-European [2] and Altaic [3] languages are pretty controversial, and in general this paper reeks a bit of glottochronology [4], which is a pretty controversial topic in historical linguistics itself.

It's worth pointing out that everybody who actually studies the relevant Altaic languages now agrees that the Altaic family doesn't exist, not even in 'micro-Altaic' (just Mongolic/Tunguskic/Turkic languages) form. Basically, the consensus is that the similarity between those three languages arise from deep contact rather than genetic relationships (think what happened to Old English after the Norse and Norman invasions on its way to Middle English).

mannykannot• 9 years ago

As someone who knows nothing about linguistics, I was surprised that the article expressed surprise that "[these root words] can be predicted from information independent of their sounds. We showed in a sample of Indo-European languages that the frequency with which a word is used in everyday speech, along with its part of speech, can predict how rapidly words evolve, with frequently used words on average retained for longer periods of time."

I would have guessed that, on the basis of utility, the conservation of words would fundamentally be a function of their meaning, and, for the most part, that function would be fairly constant across all human cultures, regardless of the specific languages used by those cultures (again on grounds of their utility.) From that perspective, would it be all that surprising if approximately the same set of meanings were conserved even in languages with no common history?

mootothemax• 9 years ago

For a good etymological mystery, it's hard to beat "dog."

Not only is the word "dog" of unknown origin, its equivalents in Spanish and various Slavic languages also apparently appeared from nowhere.

http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=dog

If that's not fun enough, there's an extinct Aboriginal language from Australia which has a word for dog. That word is also "dog" - apparently pronounced the same as in English, and a complete coincidence:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mbabaram_language

golergka• 9 years ago

Given limited set of sounds a human can pronounce, and a natural tendency to keep the most common words small, can we calculate a probability of such a coincidence? Because it seems to me it's probably a classic birthday paradox example.

pale-hands2• 9 years ago

Opposite of the topic (ultra-nonconserved?), "butterfly" is a word that is strangely different in even closely related European languages (Romance, Teutonic, Slavic). Doing a cursory check in Google Translate now, but I've one found one language pair where the words appear to be related: French: "papillon", Catalan "papallona". Otherwise: mariposa, бабочка, motyl, schmetterling, vlinder, sommerfugl, fjäril, farfalla, пеперуда, leptir ...

I'd love to hear a linguistic explanation for this.

EDIT: Latin: "papilionem" (papilio?), so at least French and Catalan have conserved it, and I can see that Italian "farfalla" could be cognate.

EDIT EDIT: All the Slavic languages known to Google Translate have a word related to motyl, except for Russian: бабочка (butterfly) (but мотылек (moth)), so there is less to this phenomenon than meets the eye!

singularity20013• 9 years ago

Why 'strangely' different? Why would you expect such exotic animals to be ultra-nonconserved?

Schmetterling may be semantically linked to butterfly via 'batter-fly' (beater-fly)

also:

motyl~moth sommerfugl~summer-fly

interesting that wiktionary for papillon shows a puppy :) might also be linked to big pupils and fake eyes

[0] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/papillon

Kostic• 9 years ago

All the Slavic languages known to Google Translate have a word related to motyl, except for Russian

In Serbian and Croatian the word for butterfly is лептир/leptir.

jaimebuelta• 9 years ago

Seems like that word is very fragmented. Here's a map of the different ways of naming it in Euskera (Basque language). In a very small area you have a lot of ways of naming the same animal...

Any reason why there's something special about butterflies that we don't agree on their name?

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CsK-lFaXEAA7zpT.jpg

ZeroGravitas• 9 years ago

I was amused to realise that Turkey (the animal) has a wide range of different names, often a country foreign to the language.

i.e in Turkey they call Turkey Indian, in Portugal they call it Peru, in Malay it's a Dutch Chicken.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_names_for_turkeys

ajuc2• 9 years ago

In Slavic languages apparently motyl etc comes from motit (motać się) = to move around randomly. Kinda fitting if you've seen a flying motyl.

jaclaz• 9 years ago

EDIT: Latin: "papilionem" (papilio?), so at least French and Catalan have conserved it, and I can see that Italian "farfalla" could be cognate.

Sure, "farfalla" is relatively recent, in old italian it is "parpaglia" or (still used in some dialects "parpaja" or "parpajon"), according to some sources:

http://www.etimoitaliano.it/2017/02/farfalla.html

There is seemingly an Indo-european root "s-par" or "s-pal" or "s-far" and the Greek "pallo" with the meaning of something that vibrates.

The root seems the same a "palpebra" (eyelid) which is paupière in French, párpado in Spanish and pálpebra in Portuguese.

wojt_eu• 9 years ago

The word "hammer" changed quite a bit, but I still find it interesting that it origins from Proto-Indo-European word for stone: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-Eur...

It still sounds somewhat familiar to modern slavic words for hammer: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/kamień#Polish

arjo1• 9 years ago

Among all the words listed, the only one which seems to be consistent across various language families is mother. All roots of mother seem to begin with "m" including in Chinese (母亲), English, Bengali. I believe South Indian languages are slightly different (correct me if I'm wrong). So perhaps this is a more modern word.

dzdt• 9 years ago

Here is their list of the 23 most conserved words, from supplementary data table one of the article:

ashes bark black fire hand I man mother not old that this thou to flow to give to hear to pull to spit we what who worm we

[1] http://pnas.org/content/110/21/8471.full

crocal• 9 years ago

The guys at Lucasfilm games almost got it perfectly right when designing SCUMM. Even the spitting in Monkey Island 2.

languagehacker• 9 years ago

The Swadesh List is used by documentary linguists for a similar reason: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swadesh_list

There are just some things all human speaker communities need to talk about. Since these tend to be "ultraconserved" words, using the Swadesh list is a great way to understand the lineage of a given under-documented language, but a bad way to understand any rule-based mechanisms associated with that language such as morphology associated with inflection or declension.

cjensen• 9 years ago

What do they mean by ultraconserved? From their examples, consider "I", "we", and "who" which are "Yo", "nostotros", and "quíen" in Spanish. If there is that much difference between closely related PIE languages, maybe I don't understand what they mean by "ultraconserved".

Ultraconserved words in use since the last Ice Age

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