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."
Words in common - Thai and English (Score:5, Interesting)
Mare - Mother or often in English Ma
Pore - Father or again often Pa
Fi - fire
Those are the only non-loan words that overlap that I've come across
It is interesting that there are any words in common of course
Re:Words in common - Thai and English (Score:4, Interesting)
You would expect a few out of sheer randomness. Especially when you're using a vague notion of similarity.
That's why most historical linguists utterly reject Greenberg's mass-comparison method. (And why cranks latch on to it: they can use it to "prove" any language relationship they care to peddle.)
mother of all languages (Score:4, Interesting)
From the article, if you can't be bothered clicking the link:
The words not, that, we, who, and give are cognates in five language families, and nouns and verbs including mother, hand, fire, ashes, worm, hear, and pull are shared by four. Going by the rate of change of these cognates, the model suggests that these words have remained in a similar form since about 14,500 years ago, thus supporting the existence of an ancient Eurasiatic language and its now far-flung descendants.
From Google:
Mother in England
Matr in Russia
Motina in Lithuanian
Mater in Latin
Manman in Haitian Creole
Ma in Chinese
Mwtr in Yiddish
Mteay in Khmer
Re:Words in common - Thai and English (Score:5, Interesting)
Thai is a bit weird too...
Moo = Pork (not Cow)
Men = Smells Bad / Foul
And its the year 2556 in Thailand, what happens if a starship lands there and asks the date, they will think they are in a time distortion, its all very confusing.
Sometimes I wonder if they are just fucking with us for the fun of it, either way I keep going back there...
Re:Words in common - Thai and English (Score:4, Interesting)
Sounds a bit of a stretch to me - relatively isolated communities like the Japanese say haha and chichi for mother and father, while the rest of the Eurasian continent pretty much go with m and p sounds. Iroquois is similar, Isten’a and Rake.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Words in common - Thai and English (Score:5, Interesting)
If you think that's weird, just take a look at some languages that ARE actually related to English but have attached very different meanings to words.
Or can you explain why "gift" means poison in German?
So if your German husband tells you he has a gift for your mom, beware!
That's nothing, in Swedish "gift" means both "married" and "poison" !
Re:Words in common - Thai and English (Score:5, Interesting)
it could be a coincidence
As the traditional linguistic dictum goes, when two contemporary words in two languages separated in time (by linguistic ancestry) and space (by geography) have similar phonetic form as well as meaning, it's vastly more likely that they aren't related at all (unless they're very recent cognates) because even if the languages can be traced to a common ancestor, the regular speed of phonetic and lexical changes would mean that the sequence of changes in both (separate) languages would follow the same path. That sort of doesn't happen.