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Ultraconserved words in use since the last Ice Age

128 points by blacksqr 9y ago

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
rabboRubble 9y 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 9y ago
  Korean - 차 (cha)
- interfixus 9y 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 9y 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.
  - rabboRubble 9y 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&___from_store=nl http://www.mightyleaftea.be/history-of-tea?___store=uk&___fr... edit: tea not teat
    - lacampbell 9y ago
      From wikipedia Starting in the early seventeen century, the Dutch played a dominant role in the early European tea trade via the Dutch East India Company.[18] The Dutch borrowed the word for "tea" (thee) from Min Chinese, either through trade directly from Fujian or Formosa where they had established a port, or from Malay traders in Bantam, Java. Also interesting speculation as to whether the chinese themselves got it the word from speakers of austro-asiatic languages living in southwest china. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tea#Etymology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tea#Etymology
  - icebraining 9y 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 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.
- jacobolus 9y 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 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”, ...
  - ajross 9y 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.
    - schoen 9y ago
      I used to have a folk etymology for chocolate as cacao + lait (or latte), which feels very plausible despite being historically incorrect!
      - nandemo 9y ago
        For some values of "plausible"? I'm pretty sure pre-Colombian mayans and aztecs didn't consume animal milk, as they hadn't domesticated cows, sheeps or goats.
        taejo 9y ago
        This is presumably a folk etymology of the French or English word "chocolate", not of the Aztec word "xocolatl"
        schoen 9y ago
        Right, I think I had thought we got it from French and that they had formed it as cocoa/cacao + lait.
- avz 9y 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 https://translate.google.com/#en/lt/tea Polish: herbata, https://translate.google.com/#en/pl/tea https://translate.google.com/#en/pl/tea Aymara: pulu, https://ay.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulu https://ay.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulu
  - iagooar 9y 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.
    - schoen 9y ago
      Wikipedia says that the -ta in Lithuanian and Polish is from Latin thea, from the phrase herba thea ('tea herb'), so there is still a morpheme in common with the other languages in this case!
      - rabboRubble 9y ago
        I think this is from New Latin, not Latin Latin.
        schoen 9y ago
        It's funny to think that the etymology of Latin thea probably runs through Dutch! Definitely New Latin.
    - kruczek 9y ago
      Interesting, I never actually encountered "czaj" used to describe tea. From a quick search it seems to be either prison slang, or a word used in eastern Poland, coming from Russia. And then there's "czajnik" for teapot.
      - fishnchips 9y ago
- lacampbell 9y ago
  They all derive from two sources Mandarin - chá Hokkien - tê
  - rabboRubble 9y 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!
    - lacampbell 9y ago
      Someone else pointed out that the reason there's a cha/te divide in Eurasia is become some countries got it via maritime tried from coastal regions where Hokkien was spoken, and others got it overland from the interior, where Mandarin was more common.
- rmetzler 9y ago
  You should lookup the word for pineapple in other languages. English is the outlier, most (or all, IIRC) call it "ananas".
  - ino 9y ago
    Also 'piña' in spanish and 'abacaxi' in brazilian portuguese. Abacaxi is such a fun word to say out loud.
    - petecox 9y ago
      Names in Spanish for fruit & veg vary greatly by country. I'm pretty sure 'ananas' is still pineapple in parts of South America, where it's a key ingredient in a Chilean cocktail. furthermore - palta = avocado, durazno = peach, choclo = corn etc - some of the words that are completely different from their Peninsular Spanish equivalents.
- beagle3 9y 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-pineapple-in-english-but-ananas-in-all-other-languages https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/134659/why-is-pi...
  - captainmuon 9y ago
    Except in Austrian German, where "Ananas" can strangely mean "strawberry" :-)
    - taejo 9y ago
      The scientific name for garden strawberries Fragaria × ananassa. They are hybrids of F. virginiana and F. chiloensis (both of which come from the parts of the Americas referred to in their names). They apparently have a pineappley aroma in comparison to their native European cousins, F. vesca.
  - marcosdumay 9y ago
    It's "abacaxi" in Brazil, although I guess it's "ananás" in Portugal.
- ruste 9y ago
  Persian - چای (Chai)
- hliyan 9y 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 9y ago
  The Bulgarian form is the same as the russian чай (chay).
mturmon 9y 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.
- rabboRubble 9y 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
  - kijin 9y 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.
  - yoodenvranx 9y 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.
    - jacobolus 9y ago
      Can you handle “square” and “girl”?
      - yoodenvranx 9y ago
        Yes, but squirrel is still impossible.
      - rangibaby 9y ago
        in Japanese: Square yes (スクエア, sukuea） Girl no (ガール, gaaru)
DanAndersen 9y 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/ 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.
kijin 9y 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 9y ago
  I think I found an online interface to the database they used: http://starling.rinet.ru/cgi-bin/query.cgi?root=config&morpho=0&basename=\data\nostr\nostret 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 9y ago
    Oh; thank you for the great link! You can even "Select another database"; they have a lot. Nice resource.
Radim 9y 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%2F978-1-4020-4068-9_13 https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-1-4020-4068-...
- tempodox 9y 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 9y ago
  Not perfect synonyms, but we do have shorter words in the same semantic ballpark: virtue, vigor, zeal, concern, care, pains...
  - Radim 9y ago
    I'd say the first three are completely off; "concern" & "care" better (I also heard "grit"), but not quite there.
    - throwanem 9y ago
      "Grit" is more like an unwillingness to surrender to adversity. "Care" I think is the closest monosyllabic equivalent. Diligence and attention to detail are specifically exhorted by "take care", and caution by "use care". Conversely, one may disclaim them all with "I don't care". It's a short word and probably an old one, so it's heavily freighted with denotations and connotations alike, and finds much use outside this context. But if you want to say "conscientiousness" in fewer than five syllables - which is a sensible thing to want - then I think "care" must be the most accurate word with which to do so.
- 9y ago
dancing_shark 9y 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 http://www.pnas.org/content/110/21/8471/T1.expansion.html
- pcrh 9y 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 9y 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 9y ago
Here's a previous thread from when this was originally posted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5669179 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5670947 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Indo-European_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Indo-European_language [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altaic_languages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altaic_languages [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glottochronology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glottochronology [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurasiatic_languages#Pagel_et_al https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurasiatic_languages#Pagel_et_....
- jcranmer 9y 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 9y 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 9y 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 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mbabaram_language
- golergka 9y 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-hands 9y 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!
  - singularity2001 9y 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 https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/papillon
wojt_eu 9y 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-European/h₂éḱmō 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 https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/kamień#Polish
arjo1 9y 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 9y 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 http://pnas.org/content/110/21/8471.full
crocal 9y ago
The guys at Lucasfilm games almost got it perfectly right when designing SCUMM. Even the spitting in Monkey Island 2.
languagehacker 9y ago
The Swadesh List is used by documentary linguists for a similar reason: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swadesh_list 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 9y 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".

128 points by blacksqr 9y ago

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

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 9y ago
Korean - 차 (cha)
interfixus 9y 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 9y 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.
- rabboRubble 9y 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&___from_store=nl http://www.mightyleaftea.be/history-of-tea?___store=uk&___fr... edit: tea not teat
  - lacampbell 9y ago
    From wikipedia Starting in the early seventeen century, the Dutch played a dominant role in the early European tea trade via the Dutch East India Company.[18] The Dutch borrowed the word for "tea" (thee) from Min Chinese, either through trade directly from Fujian or Formosa where they had established a port, or from Malay traders in Bantam, Java. Also interesting speculation as to whether the chinese themselves got it the word from speakers of austro-asiatic languages living in southwest china. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tea#Etymology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tea#Etymology
- icebraining 9y 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 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.
jacobolus 9y 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 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”, ...
- ajross 9y 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.
  - schoen 9y ago
    I used to have a folk etymology for chocolate as cacao + lait (or latte), which feels very plausible despite being historically incorrect!
    - nandemo 9y ago
      For some values of "plausible"? I'm pretty sure pre-Colombian mayans and aztecs didn't consume animal milk, as they hadn't domesticated cows, sheeps or goats.
      - taejo 9y ago
        This is presumably a folk etymology of the French or English word "chocolate", not of the Aztec word "xocolatl"
        schoen 9y ago
        Right, I think I had thought we got it from French and that they had formed it as cocoa/cacao + lait.
avz 9y 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 https://translate.google.com/#en/lt/tea Polish: herbata, https://translate.google.com/#en/pl/tea https://translate.google.com/#en/pl/tea Aymara: pulu, https://ay.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulu https://ay.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulu
- iagooar 9y 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.
  - schoen 9y ago
    Wikipedia says that the -ta in Lithuanian and Polish is from Latin thea, from the phrase herba thea ('tea herb'), so there is still a morpheme in common with the other languages in this case!
    - rabboRubble 9y ago
      I think this is from New Latin, not Latin Latin.
      - schoen 9y ago
        It's funny to think that the etymology of Latin thea probably runs through Dutch! Definitely New Latin.
  - kruczek 9y ago
    Interesting, I never actually encountered "czaj" used to describe tea. From a quick search it seems to be either prison slang, or a word used in eastern Poland, coming from Russia. And then there's "czajnik" for teapot.
    - fishnchips 9y ago
lacampbell 9y ago
They all derive from two sources Mandarin - chá Hokkien - tê
- rabboRubble 9y 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!
  - lacampbell 9y ago
    Someone else pointed out that the reason there's a cha/te divide in Eurasia is become some countries got it via maritime tried from coastal regions where Hokkien was spoken, and others got it overland from the interior, where Mandarin was more common.
rmetzler 9y ago
You should lookup the word for pineapple in other languages. English is the outlier, most (or all, IIRC) call it "ananas".
- ino 9y ago
  Also 'piña' in spanish and 'abacaxi' in brazilian portuguese. Abacaxi is such a fun word to say out loud.
  - petecox 9y ago
    Names in Spanish for fruit & veg vary greatly by country. I'm pretty sure 'ananas' is still pineapple in parts of South America, where it's a key ingredient in a Chilean cocktail. furthermore - palta = avocado, durazno = peach, choclo = corn etc - some of the words that are completely different from their Peninsular Spanish equivalents.
beagle3 9y 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-pineapple-in-english-but-ananas-in-all-other-languages https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/134659/why-is-pi...
- captainmuon 9y ago
  Except in Austrian German, where "Ananas" can strangely mean "strawberry" :-)
  - taejo 9y ago
    The scientific name for garden strawberries Fragaria × ananassa. They are hybrids of F. virginiana and F. chiloensis (both of which come from the parts of the Americas referred to in their names). They apparently have a pineappley aroma in comparison to their native European cousins, F. vesca.
- marcosdumay 9y ago
  It's "abacaxi" in Brazil, although I guess it's "ananás" in Portugal.
ruste 9y ago
Persian - چای (Chai)
hliyan 9y 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 9y ago
The Bulgarian form is the same as the russian чай (chay).

mturmon 9y 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.

rabboRubble 9y 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
- kijin 9y 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.
- yoodenvranx 9y 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.
  - jacobolus 9y ago
    Can you handle “square” and “girl”?
    - yoodenvranx 9y ago
      Yes, but squirrel is still impossible.
    - rangibaby 9y ago
      in Japanese: Square yes (スクエア, sukuea） Girl no (ガール, gaaru)

DanAndersen 9y 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/ 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.

kijin 9y 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 9y ago
I think I found an online interface to the database they used: http://starling.rinet.ru/cgi-bin/query.cgi?root=config&morpho=0&basename=\data\nostr\nostret 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 9y ago
  Oh; thank you for the great link! You can even "Select another database"; they have a lot. Nice resource.

Radim 9y 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%2F978-1-4020-4068-9_13 https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-1-4020-4068-...

tempodox 9y 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 9y ago
Not perfect synonyms, but we do have shorter words in the same semantic ballpark: virtue, vigor, zeal, concern, care, pains...
- Radim 9y ago
  I'd say the first three are completely off; "concern" & "care" better (I also heard "grit"), but not quite there.
  - throwanem 9y ago
    "Grit" is more like an unwillingness to surrender to adversity. "Care" I think is the closest monosyllabic equivalent. Diligence and attention to detail are specifically exhorted by "take care", and caution by "use care". Conversely, one may disclaim them all with "I don't care". It's a short word and probably an old one, so it's heavily freighted with denotations and connotations alike, and finds much use outside this context. But if you want to say "conscientiousness" in fewer than five syllables - which is a sensible thing to want - then I think "care" must be the most accurate word with which to do so.
9y ago

dancing_shark 9y 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 http://www.pnas.org/content/110/21/8471/T1.expansion.html

pcrh 9y 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 9y 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 9y ago

Here's a previous thread from when this was originally posted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5669179 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5670947 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Indo-European_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Indo-European_language [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altaic_languages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altaic_languages [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glottochronology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glottochronology [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurasiatic_languages#Pagel_et_al https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurasiatic_languages#Pagel_et_....

jcranmer 9y 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 9y 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 9y 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 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mbabaram_language

golergka 9y 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-hands 9y 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!
- singularity2001 9y 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 https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/papillon

wojt_eu 9y 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-European/h₂éḱmō 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 https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/kamień#Polish

arjo1 9y 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 9y 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 http://pnas.org/content/110/21/8471.full

crocal 9y ago

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

languagehacker 9y ago

The Swadesh List is used by documentary linguists for a similar reason: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swadesh_list 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 9y 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".