English May Have Retained Words From an Ice Age Language 323
sciencehabit writes "If you've ever cringed when your parents said 'groovy,' you'll know that spoken language can have a brief shelf life. But frequently used words can persist for generations, even millennia, and similar sounds and meanings often turn up in very different languages. Now, a new statistical approach suggests that peoples from Alaska to Europe may share a linguistic forebear dating as far back as the end of the Ice Age, about 15,000 years ago. Indeed, some of the words we use today may not be so different than those spoken around campfires and receding glaciers."
Re:Words in common - Thai and English (Score:5, Insightful)
Although folk etymologies are always a dangerous game. Sometimes words (especially short ones) can be the same simply by pure coincidence. This fits in with the linguistic concept of the False Cognate:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_cognate [wikipedia.org]
Stating the obvious? (Score:4, Insightful)
Some anthropologists think our ancestors already "had language" when our species began to spread around the world. If so, it may be that every language in the world is related. (The alternative being that language was invented independently more than once, and that more than one lineage has survived to the present.)
The problem is how you demonstrate it rigorously. Every historical linguist accepts the relatedness of languages in 5000-year-old families. But for proposed older relations (e.g., Nostratic, 10,000-15,000 ybp), the number of linguists that accept them is pretty much inversely proportional to the time depth.
As one of the linked summary articles points out, the further back you go the less evidence you have (lexical replacement), and the more noise (spurious similarities arising from chance). Beyond a certain point you just can't demonstrate relatedness reliably, though exactly what that point is is up for debate.
Re:Pics or it didn't (Score:4, Insightful)
Brrrrrr....
Re: Man (Score:5, Insightful)
Ever since they disbanded the office of the Devil's Advocate in the Vatican, everybody and their circus of performing poodles has been getting sainthood granted. It's a shame: being the official Catholic Church's lawyer for Satan, there to cast doubt on the claims of sainthood was not only the coolest job I could imagine, but should have been staffed by James Randi or one of his students.
It was traditionally staffed by Jesuits, so I suppose that's close enough.
What is WRONG with you people? (Score:5, Insightful)
120 posts and not ONE reference to "gin and tonic". Douglas Adams, we hardly knew ya.
Re:Man (Score:4, Insightful)
How could you tell it was Portuguese?
I don't know Portuguese. But if it looks like Spanish, but doesn't have many Spanish words, it's probably Portuguese. I'm honestly surprised that Slashdot can even handle that many accent marks.