16 ms·

Ultraconserved words point to deep language ancestry across Eurasia (2013)

108 points by benbreen 5y ago

sharikous 5y ago
Wonderful. I saw this paper and said to myself this is so neat I wish I could have done the work myself. Using statistics in this way to explain the quantifiable phenomena in language evolution makes for a milestone of the field.
- thaumasiotes 5y ago
  Ultradeep relationships between languages are to linguistics as perpetual motion machines are to physics. Everybody wants to let you know why their theory works better than everybody else's. There's a good page on zompist discussing the question of "just how likely is it that all these similar words are nothing but coincidence?"
  - enkid 5y ago
    Seems like one of those times when statistics can tell you anything you want to hear.
  - trhway 5y ago
    >"just how likely is it that all these similar words are nothing but coincidence?" like the word for mother in most of the languages is based on the sound consisting of "a" and "m" what the child makes while suckling https://www.proflowers.com/blog/56-different-ways-to-say-mom/ https://www.proflowers.com/blog/56-different-ways-to-say-mom...
    - Sharlin 5y ago
      "ma", "pa", and "da" are all among the first sounds a babbling baby typically learns to make. (As an aside, in my native language Finnish the most common word for mother, äiti, is notably not a "ma" word. It's apparently a loan from some Proto-Germanic word that has itself disappeared from extant Germanic languages. However, Finnish does have its own ancient "ma" word that means "mother": emä or emo, which is still in use when referred to non-human animal mothers, in poetry, and in a figurative sense in compound words such as emolevy "motherboard" or emäalus "mothership".)
  - bradrn 5y ago
    Links: http://www.zompist.com/proto.html http://www.zompist.com/proto.html (with less statistics), http://www.zompist.com/chance.htm http://www.zompist.com/chance.htm (with more statistics).
- mcswell 5y ago
  Good statistics depends on good data. Theirs isn't. See the posts higher up for links to comments at Language Log.
tehchromic 5y ago
I find this absolutely fascinating, especially in the context of emergent technology. One could speculate: will persistent interactive mass media platforms eliminate or vastly reduce the rate of word replacement? Or will they accelerate it? A competent linguist might be able to give a good opinion but even so it seems debatable. Maybe linguistic change is contingent on the sorts of traumatic cultural divisions that were commonplace before the advent of global culture and technology, or maybe language changes more when more people talk to each other. Is language change accidental and traumatagenic or creative and intentional?
MengerSponge 5y ago
Reading about ultraconserved words really makes me hungry for lox.
- mcguire 5y ago
  Why would you want to ingest liquid oxygen? :-)
  - ThomasWinwood 5y ago
    For the benefit of future readers who don't get it, if nothing else: the "salmon problem" (in German Lachsargument) is an old argument that the origin of the Indo-European language family should be in the Baltic region, because the word for "salmon" is found in both the Germanic and Balto-Slavic branches. Later research in the Caucasus found that the reflexes of the word referred to trout, which is found in rivers on the Eurasian steppe. (They're both species in the genus Salmo, so it makes sense that semantic drift would occur in populations moving to a new area.)
andolanra 5y ago
This research is built on some pretty shaky ground—including some very loaded picking-and-choosing of vocabulary—and because it doesn't have very strong predictive power, hasn't made much of a dent in the community in the last decade since it's been published. Here's a discussion from the blog Language Log that discusses a lot of the methodological problems that show up: https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4612 https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4612
- topaz0 5y ago
  I remember that languagelog post. Some great critique in there.
- ummonk 5y ago
  Aside from the specific details, I feel like papers of this nature would be on much firmer ground if they included controls. In this case for example, that would mean showing that are greater word-correspondences in these eurasian language families than with other language families.
- mcswell 5y ago
  Nuts, you beat me to it; I was going to provide that exact same link, together with an excerpt from a comment: "The LWED database reconstructions just aren't good enough to form the basis of a successful effort along those lines." Here's another relevant post at Language Log: https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4634 https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4634. (Before anyone gets too excited, notice the "filed under" terms.)
RcouF1uZ4gsC 5y ago
What is interesting is that Chinese is not I this superfamily. For me, ancient Chinese civilization is so interesting in large part because of how isolated it is. Mesopotamia, Egypt, Persia and even India were in regular communication with each other. Empires such as the Persians and Alexander the Great fought across all these civilizations. The Romans had direct trade with India via the Indian Ocean. However, Chinese civilization is located far away from those ones. I think there is still debate if Chinese writing rose de novo or was influenced by writing from Sumer. At the same time, even though it was so distant, China still had a very advanced civilization (and in many ways was more advanced than those of the Middle East and Europe for much of history)
- Bayart 5y ago
  >I think there is still debate if Chinese writing rose de novo or was influenced by writing from Sumer. Hardly. There's no discernable relationship in that respect between China and the Near East. As far as anybody's aware, China's writing is indigeneous. If you want a real isolated and independent civilisation core, look at central America.
  - jng 5y ago
    There was travel and commerce between far out regions in that period (1,500-3,500 BCE). The connection between the three old-world starts of writing (Sumerian, Egyptian and Chinese) is, AFAIK, not 100% clarified yet. It's widely accepted that American writing was a separate original invention, it makes sense. I believe these days the accepted understanding is that Egyptian hieroglyphic writing is an independent development that may, or may not, have been inspired by Sumerian writing. Not hard to believe: "you know son, these peoples far far away know magic, they're able to make dents in a table containing a story, and then pass on the tablet to someone else and they can retell the story!" Chinese writing may, or may not, have also come up the same way.
- thisiscorrect 5y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Roman_relations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Roman_relations might be relevant to your interests.
kldavis4 5y ago
If you find this topic interesting, I highly recommend John McWhorter's course, The Story of Human Language. It's available on Audible / The Great Courses. I learned a lot and was fascinated throughout.
- dorchadas 5y ago
  I'd also recommend Lyle Campbell's Historical Linguistics: An Introduction for historical linguistics especially. It's a very concise introduction and I believe you could understand most of it without a deep background in linguistics (maybe some understanding of the IPA and phonetics mostly)
- Ostrogodsky 5y ago
willcipriano 5y ago
I heard about this paper from a song[0]. [0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Md-sVK3yxJY&t=3s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Md-sVK3yxJY&t=3s
DC-3 5y ago
I am doing a Computer Sceince masters in this field. I am personally quite sceptical of this study. The methodology seems somewhat arbitrary and I doubt that the signal is there for what they are inferring from the data. I suspect this is a case of finding what you want to find.
fdgsdfogijq 5y ago
The big secret of history is that there was far more mixing between disparate cultures than is currently let on. There are many reasons that this is not widely accepted into the historical cannon, the main one being that some cultures most esteemed figures and events were catalyzed or can be completely attributed to another group of people/culture. General examples being, some sea faring civilization A far in the past sailed 2000 miles, mixed with some other civilization B, which catalyzed notable events there, which are now attributed to that civilizations B greatness. In schools the children are taught of those events, but evidence supporting a root in civilization A is suppressed or even destroyed.
- 908B64B197 5y ago
  You don't even need to look far to find examples of this! What's funnier is when it's sponsored by the taxed of civilization A and B! [0] [0] https://www.cbc.ca/news/entertainment/cbc-apology-story-of-us-1.4065767 https://www.cbc.ca/news/entertainment/cbc-apology-story-of-u...
- singularity2001 5y ago
  The beauty of your statement is that it will become more and more provable through fine grained DNA analysis. The history of Neolithic Europe has been determined by recent (<10 years) results of multiple waves (almost) repopulating the old hunter gatherer stocks. There may grow a new school of linguists who deeply incorporate these waves with layers of language. Interestingly the arrival of horses, chariots and advanced metallurgy in China did not leave much of an impression on the gene pool, at least not detected (detectable?) by current data/methods.
  - imbnwa 5y ago
    Isn't a theory that Basque is the last surviving population of these original European hunter-gatherers? Possibly Etruscan as well?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
yosito 5y ago
I had a hard time parsing what this actually means in terms of which words are actually connected. I speak Hungarian, which is a Uralic language supposed to have split from Finnish roughly 3000 years ago. I've seen a few instances in a dictionary where the common roots between the two are connected, though it rarely seems connected from casual observation. People often think there are some shared roots between Hungarian and Turkish, due to more recent occupation of Hungary by the Turks, which led to many Turkish loan words, but the connection is mostly superficial. Hungarian also has a few loan words from Latin mostly from the last couple Hundred years, but I'd be fascinated to learn about any connections between Hungarian and Latin via some shared ancestral roots.
yawaramin 5y ago
Not really related to this paper, but something that really amuses me is that the two words 'aré?!' ('huh?!') and 'nai' ('is not there') have exactly the same meaning in both Japanese and Bengali. Two languages that you would not expect to be anywhere close to each other.
- fooker 5y ago
  The etymology seems sort of different.

108 points by benbreen 5y ago

Wonderful. I saw this paper and said to myself this is so neat I wish I could have done the work myself. Using statistics in this way to explain the quantifiable phenomena in language evolution makes for a milestone of the field.

thaumasiotes 5y ago
Ultradeep relationships between languages are to linguistics as perpetual motion machines are to physics. Everybody wants to let you know why their theory works better than everybody else's. There's a good page on zompist discussing the question of "just how likely is it that all these similar words are nothing but coincidence?"
- enkid 5y ago
  Seems like one of those times when statistics can tell you anything you want to hear.
- trhway 5y ago
  >"just how likely is it that all these similar words are nothing but coincidence?" like the word for mother in most of the languages is based on the sound consisting of "a" and "m" what the child makes while suckling https://www.proflowers.com/blog/56-different-ways-to-say-mom/ https://www.proflowers.com/blog/56-different-ways-to-say-mom...
  - Sharlin 5y ago
    "ma", "pa", and "da" are all among the first sounds a babbling baby typically learns to make. (As an aside, in my native language Finnish the most common word for mother, äiti, is notably not a "ma" word. It's apparently a loan from some Proto-Germanic word that has itself disappeared from extant Germanic languages. However, Finnish does have its own ancient "ma" word that means "mother": emä or emo, which is still in use when referred to non-human animal mothers, in poetry, and in a figurative sense in compound words such as emolevy "motherboard" or emäalus "mothership".)
- bradrn 5y ago
  Links: http://www.zompist.com/proto.html http://www.zompist.com/proto.html (with less statistics), http://www.zompist.com/chance.htm http://www.zompist.com/chance.htm (with more statistics).
mcswell 5y ago
Good statistics depends on good data. Theirs isn't. See the posts higher up for links to comments at Language Log.

tehchromic 5y ago

I find this absolutely fascinating, especially in the context of emergent technology. One could speculate: will persistent interactive mass media platforms eliminate or vastly reduce the rate of word replacement? Or will they accelerate it? A competent linguist might be able to give a good opinion but even so it seems debatable. Maybe linguistic change is contingent on the sorts of traumatic cultural divisions that were commonplace before the advent of global culture and technology, or maybe language changes more when more people talk to each other. Is language change accidental and traumatagenic or creative and intentional?

MengerSponge 5y ago

Reading about ultraconserved words really makes me hungry for lox.

mcguire 5y ago
Why would you want to ingest liquid oxygen? :-)
- ThomasWinwood 5y ago
  For the benefit of future readers who don't get it, if nothing else: the "salmon problem" (in German Lachsargument) is an old argument that the origin of the Indo-European language family should be in the Baltic region, because the word for "salmon" is found in both the Germanic and Balto-Slavic branches. Later research in the Caucasus found that the reflexes of the word referred to trout, which is found in rivers on the Eurasian steppe. (They're both species in the genus Salmo, so it makes sense that semantic drift would occur in populations moving to a new area.)

andolanra 5y ago

This research is built on some pretty shaky ground—including some very loaded picking-and-choosing of vocabulary—and because it doesn't have very strong predictive power, hasn't made much of a dent in the community in the last decade since it's been published. Here's a discussion from the blog Language Log that discusses a lot of the methodological problems that show up: https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4612 https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4612

topaz0 5y ago
I remember that languagelog post. Some great critique in there.
ummonk 5y ago
Aside from the specific details, I feel like papers of this nature would be on much firmer ground if they included controls. In this case for example, that would mean showing that are greater word-correspondences in these eurasian language families than with other language families.
mcswell 5y ago
Nuts, you beat me to it; I was going to provide that exact same link, together with an excerpt from a comment: "The LWED database reconstructions just aren't good enough to form the basis of a successful effort along those lines." Here's another relevant post at Language Log: https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4634 https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4634. (Before anyone gets too excited, notice the "filed under" terms.)

RcouF1uZ4gsC 5y ago

What is interesting is that Chinese is not I this superfamily. For me, ancient Chinese civilization is so interesting in large part because of how isolated it is. Mesopotamia, Egypt, Persia and even India were in regular communication with each other. Empires such as the Persians and Alexander the Great fought across all these civilizations. The Romans had direct trade with India via the Indian Ocean. However, Chinese civilization is located far away from those ones. I think there is still debate if Chinese writing rose de novo or was influenced by writing from Sumer. At the same time, even though it was so distant, China still had a very advanced civilization (and in many ways was more advanced than those of the Middle East and Europe for much of history)

Bayart 5y ago
>I think there is still debate if Chinese writing rose de novo or was influenced by writing from Sumer. Hardly. There's no discernable relationship in that respect between China and the Near East. As far as anybody's aware, China's writing is indigeneous. If you want a real isolated and independent civilisation core, look at central America.
- jng 5y ago
  There was travel and commerce between far out regions in that period (1,500-3,500 BCE). The connection between the three old-world starts of writing (Sumerian, Egyptian and Chinese) is, AFAIK, not 100% clarified yet. It's widely accepted that American writing was a separate original invention, it makes sense. I believe these days the accepted understanding is that Egyptian hieroglyphic writing is an independent development that may, or may not, have been inspired by Sumerian writing. Not hard to believe: "you know son, these peoples far far away know magic, they're able to make dents in a table containing a story, and then pass on the tablet to someone else and they can retell the story!" Chinese writing may, or may not, have also come up the same way.
thisiscorrect 5y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Roman_relations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Roman_relations might be relevant to your interests.

kldavis4 5y ago

If you find this topic interesting, I highly recommend John McWhorter's course, The Story of Human Language. It's available on Audible / The Great Courses. I learned a lot and was fascinated throughout.

dorchadas 5y ago
I'd also recommend Lyle Campbell's Historical Linguistics: An Introduction for historical linguistics especially. It's a very concise introduction and I believe you could understand most of it without a deep background in linguistics (maybe some understanding of the IPA and phonetics mostly)
Ostrogodsky 5y ago

willcipriano 5y ago

I heard about this paper from a song[0]. [0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Md-sVK3yxJY&t=3s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Md-sVK3yxJY&t=3s

DC-3 5y ago

I am doing a Computer Sceince masters in this field. I am personally quite sceptical of this study. The methodology seems somewhat arbitrary and I doubt that the signal is there for what they are inferring from the data. I suspect this is a case of finding what you want to find.

fdgsdfogijq 5y ago

The big secret of history is that there was far more mixing between disparate cultures than is currently let on. There are many reasons that this is not widely accepted into the historical cannon, the main one being that some cultures most esteemed figures and events were catalyzed or can be completely attributed to another group of people/culture. General examples being, some sea faring civilization A far in the past sailed 2000 miles, mixed with some other civilization B, which catalyzed notable events there, which are now attributed to that civilizations B greatness. In schools the children are taught of those events, but evidence supporting a root in civilization A is suppressed or even destroyed.

908B64B197 5y ago
You don't even need to look far to find examples of this! What's funnier is when it's sponsored by the taxed of civilization A and B! [0] [0] https://www.cbc.ca/news/entertainment/cbc-apology-story-of-us-1.4065767 https://www.cbc.ca/news/entertainment/cbc-apology-story-of-u...
singularity2001 5y ago
The beauty of your statement is that it will become more and more provable through fine grained DNA analysis. The history of Neolithic Europe has been determined by recent (<10 years) results of multiple waves (almost) repopulating the old hunter gatherer stocks. There may grow a new school of linguists who deeply incorporate these waves with layers of language. Interestingly the arrival of horses, chariots and advanced metallurgy in China did not leave much of an impression on the gene pool, at least not detected (detectable?) by current data/methods.
- imbnwa 5y ago
  Isn't a theory that Basque is the last surviving population of these original European hunter-gatherers? Possibly Etruscan as well?
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

yosito 5y ago

I had a hard time parsing what this actually means in terms of which words are actually connected. I speak Hungarian, which is a Uralic language supposed to have split from Finnish roughly 3000 years ago. I've seen a few instances in a dictionary where the common roots between the two are connected, though it rarely seems connected from casual observation. People often think there are some shared roots between Hungarian and Turkish, due to more recent occupation of Hungary by the Turks, which led to many Turkish loan words, but the connection is mostly superficial. Hungarian also has a few loan words from Latin mostly from the last couple Hundred years, but I'd be fascinated to learn about any connections between Hungarian and Latin via some shared ancestral roots.

yawaramin 5y ago

Not really related to this paper, but something that really amuses me is that the two words 'aré?!' ('huh?!') and 'nai' ('is not there') have exactly the same meaning in both Japanese and Bengali. Two languages that you would not expect to be anywhere close to each other.

fooker 5y ago
The etymology seems sort of different.