7 ms·

Linguists identify 15,000-year-old ‘ultraconserved words’

108 points by tokenadult 14y ago

pwg 14y ago
The original publication is linked to from here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5667610 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5667610
tokenadult 14y ago
This is the citation to the underlying research study. Mark Pagel, Quentin D. Atkinson, Andreea S. Calude, and Andrew Meade. Ultraconserved words point to deep language ancestry across Eurasia. PNAS 2013; published ahead of print May 6, 2013, doi:10.1073/pnas.1218726110 Abstract link: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2013/05/01/1218726110 http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2013/05/01/1218726110 Link to .PDF full text: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2013/05/01/1218726110.full.pdf+html http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2013/05/01/1218726110.full...
ryusage 14y ago
Interesting. Is there some objective way of determining if the words are cognates or not? In particular, in the audio section, the Inuit-Yupik example for "thou" sounds very out of place.
- mzs 14y ago
  I would like someone to answer as well. See I only know English, Polish, and German pretty well. So take father, ojciec, and vater. I don't see it. Thinking about it the languages I know, I would expect something like ta da pa (or backward) at, ad, ap. Would they say the ojci it sort of like a at sound and close enough? Edit: Wait a minute, though matka and ojciec are the words for mother and father in Polish, little kids might say more mama and tata. I might have answered my own question here, but I too noticed some in the linked web page did not sound particularly similar to me.
  - andolanra 14y ago
    Words are cognate if they stem from a common root. How can we tell? If we have two sets of words S and T, then we need to postulate a third set R of 'proto-words' as well as two mappings R → S and R → T where the mappings can (within reasonable margins of error) predict the form of the words given the roots. For example, take German and Latin: I assert the words Vater and pater (both 'father') are cognate, but to do so, I need to examine a whole set of corresponding words in both languages, so I take the sets {Vater, Fisch, Fuß} and {pater, piscis, pes}. From these, I can see clear correspondences (e.g. a German f sound always corresponds to a Latin p sound[1], the Latin sc seems to correspond to the German sch) and some things that are unchanged. Next, I come up with a set of roots like {pater, piš, pes} and a set of rules to apply like {p → f in German, š → sc in Latin, š → sch in German}, and I can state with some confidence that these words descend from a common root. In practice, you'd do this with way* more than three words—preferably you'd use most of the language—and there is some wiggle room for related meanings or exceptional changes, e.g. the German word alt and English word old seem unrelated to the Latin word senere 'to be old', because they actually stem from words for 'to grow up', and are therefore cognate to the Latin altus 'high, tall'. Additionally, some rules are more plausible than others based on research and phonological considerations, so the change of s → h is well-attested in actual languages and is consistent with similarities between the two sounds, while the change of r → b is highly unlikely. And while there is some room for error, there is a limit e.g. one might argue that English and Japanese are cognate because in Japanese, 'to eat' is taberu and 'to see' is miru, and in English we eat off a table and see in a mirror. This doesn't get borne out with more thorough phonological rules and doesn't seem to reflect regular semantic processes, either. tl;dr: Two words are cognate if they come from a common root; without direct knowledge of the parent language (e.g. Latin for Italian and French), we postulate one and show that regular processes can derive the child languages' vocabulary. [1]: If you don't speak German, know that the German v is pronounced like an f.
    - mzs 14y ago
      That was an excellent explanation, thank you. Also regarding ojciec, I found this: http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ojciec#Etymology http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ojciec#Etymology The changing over time following rules was the missing part for me.
jbattle 14y ago
I don't get this. I know this is a monstrously crude approach, but I put the sentence given in the article to Google translate "You, hear me! Give this fire to that old man. Pull the black worm off the bark and give it to the mother. And no spitting in the ashes!" After translating it into a few different languages, almost none of the words sound anywhere close to their English counterparts. French and Danish had a fair bit of similarities but that's to be expected. Am I fundamentally misunderstanding something here? For reference I tried estonian, albanian, czech, finnish, and georgian
- saraid216 14y ago
  Try setting it up, walking away for 5 minutes or so (clearing your mind of the original English), and then comparing the translations that aren't English. The idea is that the fact that we understand English gives it a different quality, and you want to subtract that from your analysis. Don't know if it'll help, but it might.
- ewoodrich 14y ago
  I believe you are confusing the spoken sound of a particular cognate with the semantic meanings of the word that have remained consistent across different languages. For example, "fire" has a very direct translation in a large number of languages. Historically, it was believed that the evolution of word-use would preclude such semantic stability, but the words these researchers identified are perhaps suggestive of a common proto-Eurasiatic language. The fact that less used words like "flow" and "worm" remained consistent legitimizes this theory.
- coldtea 14y ago
  >Am I fundamentally misunderstanding something here? Perhaps. For one, Google translate is not very accurate, even for simple stuff. Second, the translations it picks might no be the form that has survived from the old times. Newer words might have put the use of the older form in disfavour, but it can still exist in the language. If something was the same in a language from 15,000 years ago up to 500 years ago, it won't be picked up in Google Translate, which will pick the current vernacular. Third, they probably give an exact table of the equivalencies they found in the actual paper. It would be easier to check that if they have it available for free. Four, they speak about how words sound, not how the look. So you have to take pronunciation of each language into account, which often can be quite different from what is written.
andolanra 14y ago
I'm going to reserve judgment on the findings themselves until I read the paper (although, having a background in historical linguistics, I've learned to be very skeptical of any claim that posits historical superfamilies.) However, I will complain about the pop-science intro, because the thought that a hunter-gatherer has some chance of understanding a sentence like the one given is laughably preposterous. An Old English speaker would only barely understand it (just as we would only barely understand gief þæm menn ealdan þisne fýr[1]), to say nothing of the many thousands of years of change between us and the hunter-gatherers spoken of. There is a vast difference between 'two words have a statistically provable correspondence' and 'two words are understood as the same word.' [1]: My old English is pretty weak, so I take full responsibility for grammatical errors. Edit: accidentally used 'th' instead of 'þ' in the Old English.
- DanBC 14y ago
  What do you think about theories like Vilayanur Ramachandran's that some words exist because they are sort of onomatopoeic? (http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/reith2003/lecture4.shtml http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/reith2003/lecture4.shtml)
  - duskwuff 14y ago
    I can certainly believe it for one of the examples given, "to spit". The audio examples are clearly imitative, especially in the terminal syllable, which almost always uses a consonant like [p]. (Just like someone spitting.) http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/national/words-that-last/ http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/national/words-...
  - nijk 14y ago
    That is someone's theory? That's what 'onomatopoeia' means.
    - DanBC 14y ago
      I've really dumbed it down, and horribly mangled it. Read the link I provided, he does a much better job there. If you don't want to read all of it just search for "Now, remember I said the third thing you have to do in science is show that this is not just some quirk.", and read from the top of that section. 'slush' is onomatopoeic. Is 'axe'? How about 'milk' or 'mother'?
foob 14y ago
In fact, they calculated that words uttered at least 16 times per day by an average speaker had the greatest chance of being cognates in at least three language families. If chance had been the explanation, some rarely used words would have ended up on the list. But they didn’t. I don't think that this logic is valid. It assumes that if the languages had had no common ancestry that any random word would be similarly likely to match between the languages. I'm no linguist but in my experience the most fundamental and commonly used words tend to be shorter, often composed of a single syllable. It also makes sense that the more fundamental words would be created early on and be given simple sounds while later words would be more complicated by necessity. If this is the case then you would expect more random coincidences within the cores of different languages than outside of them. This is also consistent with the fact that most of the examples in the article are very short: thou, give, hand, bark, spit, worm. I think that this would need to be taken into account in the statistical analysis before attempting to draw any conclusion.
ttrreeww 14y ago
“I was really delighted to see ‘to give’ there,” Pagel said. “Human society is characterized by a degree of cooperation and reciprocity that you simply don’t see in any other animal. Verbs tend to change fairly quickly, but that one hasn’t.”
- nijk 14y ago
  This is the sort of unscientific wishfulness that undermines the analysis. And is directly contradicted by known animal behavior.
  - ttrreeww 14y ago
    Your way of living is not a happy one.
    - csallen 14y ago
      It's unfortunate that you believe happiness requires self-delusion.
      - yekko 14y ago
        And you just know more than the experts. Armchair expert...
dmd 14y ago
languagehat writes, over at metafilter: Yeah, this is complete bullshit. Actual linguists weigh in in this LH thread [ http://www.languagehat.com/archives/004994.php http://www.languagehat.com/archives/004994.php ]; Marie-Lucie Tarpent writes: The article announces "Eurasiatic" (a hypothetical supergroup originally suggested by Joseph Greenberg of "Amerind" notoriety) as a major discovery by scientists (not linguists) but seems somewhat confused as to its relation with PIE. It also quotes a few words which the authors interpret as culturally too important to have been lost or replaced, so that they have lasted 15,000 years (one of these words is "bark" (of a tree) for which the authors propose an explanation). Like Renfrew and the Proto-World people, the authors do not seem to differentiate between the survival of a lexical item (although made unrecognizable through millennia of phonological changes) and the survival of the sounds that compose it (which are independent of the meaning of the whole word) (eg Renfrew et al thought that words for 'nephew' had endured almost unchanged for hundreds of years because of the importance of this concept, but actually this longevity is due to the fact that the consonants in the word had been more resistant to change than others, as shown by the behaviour of those consonants in other words totally unrelated semantically to 'nephew'). In any case, the article does not cite any actual forms, only meanings. Read it at your own risk. And Piotr Gąsiorowski says: This is exactly the kind of approach which makes wishful thinking look like science and gets it past reviewers. Even if the numerical methods are basically sound, the data are garbage (obtained by the intuitive eyeballing of reconstructions from the Tower of Babel database -- itself a highly questionable source -- without any actual comparative analysis). No different from ordinary "mass comparison", except perhaps for a tighter control of semantic matches. [...] I realise that one has to start somewhere, but mass comparison is at best of some help in formulating preliminary hypotheses, and mass comparison based on unreliable data is no use at all.
- kylebgorman 14y ago
  Very few reputable linguists believe in a hypothetical supergroup of "Eurasiatic". The reason that the same linguists are skeptical is that related languages diverge fast enough that after a few millenia, any similarities beyond that are indistinguishable from chance similarity.
meric 14y ago
It says Chinese wasn't included in the seven family of languages. Yet, I, a english and cantonese speaker, couldn't help but notice these two words which sound similar in both languages. Mother is "ma" in English, and also "ma" in Cantonese. Father is "pa" or "dad" in English, and "ba" or "deh" in Cantonese. Remarkably similar, considering both languages are considered by linguists to be practically completely unrelated.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
  - meric 14y ago
    Those two aren't original terms, they're merely more formal terms. (e.g. mother and father rather than ma and pa). Cantonese sounds more similar to Classical Chinese than Mandarin does. According to Cantonese wikipedia for "ba"[1] and "ma"[2], in ancient times the word "父" sounds close to the modern day cantonese "爸" (ba) and likewise for "母" and "媽" (ma). [1] http://zh-yue.wikipedia.org/wiki/阿爸 http://zh-yue.wikipedia.org/wiki/阿爸 [2] https://zh-yue.wikipedia.org/wiki/阿媽 https://zh-yue.wikipedia.org/wiki/阿媽 I doubt it can be explained away as merely Western influence. Perhaps it's English that received some Chinese influence? ;) I heard the word "kowtow" originated from China, too.
    - madaxe 14y ago
      The Silk Road (the actual road) caused a high degree of intermingling between mesopotamian and asian populations throughout the last 4,000 years. Rather than having the same stem, it's more likely that these cognates snuck in later.
- mkl 14y ago
  The words are similar because these are some of the first sounds babies learn to make.
bane 14y ago
Naive review of the interactive infographic thou Altaic, Dravidian, Indo-European and Uralic sound similar enough I can see how Chukchi-Kamchatkan and Kartvelian might end up where they are And then we end up with Inuit-Yupik which sounds so dissimilar, the only thing I hear in common with the others is that it was apparently made by a human to give okay, I can kinda see maybe where Altaic, Inuit-Yupik and Uralic ended up where they are, but they're definitely different sounds Dravidian and Indo-European are a bit more similar, but don't sound like they have anything in common with the others at all hand okay, these are sorta similar, there's a clear m-vowel-n element in most of them but Indo-European gets all "weird" bark Altaic and Uralic may as well be slight accents Inuit-Yupik diverges quite a bit and Indo-European even more. If I squint I can kind of see some similarity with a k-vowel then some other stuff so...okay to spit these are the most similar to my ear, it probably doesn't hurt hat these appear to be onomatopoeia as well. Indo-European just seems to have reversed the bits somewhere along the way. If you squint "spit" in English would fit right in with these. I always come away from these kinds of linguistic analyses scratching my head. Especially once you hear the words in the different languages.
Waiting4Hellban 14y ago
Why couldn't the NYT have transitioned as eloquently as the Washington Post onto the web?
graycat 14y ago
So, suppose we want to know what 'bark' sounded like in the common language 15,000 years ago. Call that common language X. Well, take languages A and B now where 'bark' is shared as a cognate. Now, start with language A now and realize that as we go back in time 15,000 years ago to language X how 'bark' was pronounced changed year by year. Then realize that as we go forward in time from language X 15,000 years ago to language B now, how 'bark' was pronounced has changed year by year. Then the change in how 'bark' is pronounced in languages now is smaller than either the change from language A now to language X 15,000 years ago or from language B now to language X 15,000 years ago. So, how close is how 'bark' is pronounced now to how it was pronounced 15,000 years ago? Closer than to how 'bark' is pronounced between A and B now. So, if 'bark' is pronounced nearly the same in languages A and B now, then it was pronounced nearly the same 15,000 years ago. Thus we have an approximation to how 'bark' sounded 15,000 years ago. It may be that languages A and B have a common ancestor more recently than 15,000 years ago. So, for a better approximation want to pick for languages A and B languages for which we have some hope that their most recent common ancestor was X 15,000 years ago. How to do this? For candidate pairs A and B, look at geographical and genetic distances and pick the most distant pair.
- Retric 14y ago
  Individual words often migrate between languages even if they don't share a common ancestor.
  - graycat 14y ago
    Cute. And there are other issues with what I wrote. For a more careful analysis, would have to do, say, a 'probabilistic' analysis, e.g., where in principle can walk back to the beginning and start over but actually, e.g., with some common assumptions, in a space of dimension 3 or greater, probabilistically keep getting farther from the starting point. Your point should come out in the wash in estimating where there is a common language and how far back if use more than one word, etc. My guess, especially from many of the other comments on this thread, is that the basic data is so bad, noisy, etc. and pronunciation changes so large that the math I outlined, while basically correct, would mostly give such large distances that we wouldn't learn much. Maybe a better solution would be just to assume that the tree of languages would follow the tree of genetic inheritance and, then, via genetic analysis trace that tree. But the article wanted to ask what one of those 'common' words would 'sound' like 15,000 years ago, so I gave a way to get an approximation. The cute part is while 'father' in English sounds a bit different from 'vater' in German, the common ancestor should sound closer to either 'father' or 'vater' than those to two each other, that is, closer rather than farther away. That is, our intuition would be that the sound from 15,000 years ago should be much different from either the current 'father' or 'vater', but with the math model I gave that should be wrong.
sinkasapa 14y ago
Another negative response from a linguist http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4612 http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4612
juhanima 14y ago
I wonder what kind of metrics could be achieved simply by measuring how many mAhs it takes from google translate to translate from one language to another? EDIT: Put simply, converting understandable sentences from one language to another is a lot more than just counting word frequences. Sorry having been mentioned an actual company name there! I just wrote a lenghty text in Finnish and had it translated by an on-line service to English. Suprisingly, it wasn't the vocabulary but is was the structure that mattered. The machince got 99% of the words right, but it lost the meaning in 1/10 of the cases. EDIT2: Not really sure who I am arguing here, on a stale thread, but I just have to finish the thought. So it takes a measureable amount of work to analyze a sentence in a language into an abstract syntax tree. An another amount of work to synthetize that back into an understandable sentence in another language. The average sum of that work for all given sentences is the lingual distance of the two languages. No? Of course all language analyzers and synthetizers are not equally good. What caught my eye, however, was how poor English a network translator was able to produce out of my Finnish. I'm pretty sure (althought the jury is still out on that) that the Russian it produced out of the same origin was remarkably more understandable. The main reason being the liberal word order. I somehow assumed the english synthetizer would have been the top of the line. Turned out if wasn't. Or else the language model was not deep enough, which actually is a more plausible explanation. Ok, thanks!

108 points by tokenadult 14y ago

pwg 14y ago

The original publication is linked to from here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5667610 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5667610

tokenadult 14y ago

This is the citation to the underlying research study. Mark Pagel, Quentin D. Atkinson, Andreea S. Calude, and Andrew Meade. Ultraconserved words point to deep language ancestry across Eurasia. PNAS 2013; published ahead of print May 6, 2013, doi:10.1073/pnas.1218726110 Abstract link: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2013/05/01/1218726110 http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2013/05/01/1218726110 Link to .PDF full text: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2013/05/01/1218726110.full.pdf+html http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2013/05/01/1218726110.full...

ryusage 14y ago

Interesting. Is there some objective way of determining if the words are cognates or not? In particular, in the audio section, the Inuit-Yupik example for "thou" sounds very out of place.

mzs 14y ago
I would like someone to answer as well. See I only know English, Polish, and German pretty well. So take father, ojciec, and vater. I don't see it. Thinking about it the languages I know, I would expect something like ta da pa (or backward) at, ad, ap. Would they say the ojci it sort of like a at sound and close enough? Edit: Wait a minute, though matka and ojciec are the words for mother and father in Polish, little kids might say more mama and tata. I might have answered my own question here, but I too noticed some in the linked web page did not sound particularly similar to me.
- andolanra 14y ago
  Words are cognate if they stem from a common root. How can we tell? If we have two sets of words S and T, then we need to postulate a third set R of 'proto-words' as well as two mappings R → S and R → T where the mappings can (within reasonable margins of error) predict the form of the words given the roots. For example, take German and Latin: I assert the words Vater and pater (both 'father') are cognate, but to do so, I need to examine a whole set of corresponding words in both languages, so I take the sets {Vater, Fisch, Fuß} and {pater, piscis, pes}. From these, I can see clear correspondences (e.g. a German f sound always corresponds to a Latin p sound[1], the Latin sc seems to correspond to the German sch) and some things that are unchanged. Next, I come up with a set of roots like {pater, piš, pes} and a set of rules to apply like {p → f in German, š → sc in Latin, š → sch in German}, and I can state with some confidence that these words descend from a common root. In practice, you'd do this with way* more than three words—preferably you'd use most of the language—and there is some wiggle room for related meanings or exceptional changes, e.g. the German word alt and English word old seem unrelated to the Latin word senere 'to be old', because they actually stem from words for 'to grow up', and are therefore cognate to the Latin altus 'high, tall'. Additionally, some rules are more plausible than others based on research and phonological considerations, so the change of s → h is well-attested in actual languages and is consistent with similarities between the two sounds, while the change of r → b is highly unlikely. And while there is some room for error, there is a limit e.g. one might argue that English and Japanese are cognate because in Japanese, 'to eat' is taberu and 'to see' is miru, and in English we eat off a table and see in a mirror. This doesn't get borne out with more thorough phonological rules and doesn't seem to reflect regular semantic processes, either. tl;dr: Two words are cognate if they come from a common root; without direct knowledge of the parent language (e.g. Latin for Italian and French), we postulate one and show that regular processes can derive the child languages' vocabulary. [1]: If you don't speak German, know that the German v is pronounced like an f.
  - mzs 14y ago
    That was an excellent explanation, thank you. Also regarding ojciec, I found this: http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ojciec#Etymology http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ojciec#Etymology The changing over time following rules was the missing part for me.

jbattle 14y ago

I don't get this. I know this is a monstrously crude approach, but I put the sentence given in the article to Google translate "You, hear me! Give this fire to that old man. Pull the black worm off the bark and give it to the mother. And no spitting in the ashes!" After translating it into a few different languages, almost none of the words sound anywhere close to their English counterparts. French and Danish had a fair bit of similarities but that's to be expected. Am I fundamentally misunderstanding something here? For reference I tried estonian, albanian, czech, finnish, and georgian

saraid216 14y ago
Try setting it up, walking away for 5 minutes or so (clearing your mind of the original English), and then comparing the translations that aren't English. The idea is that the fact that we understand English gives it a different quality, and you want to subtract that from your analysis. Don't know if it'll help, but it might.
ewoodrich 14y ago
I believe you are confusing the spoken sound of a particular cognate with the semantic meanings of the word that have remained consistent across different languages. For example, "fire" has a very direct translation in a large number of languages. Historically, it was believed that the evolution of word-use would preclude such semantic stability, but the words these researchers identified are perhaps suggestive of a common proto-Eurasiatic language. The fact that less used words like "flow" and "worm" remained consistent legitimizes this theory.
coldtea 14y ago
>Am I fundamentally misunderstanding something here? Perhaps. For one, Google translate is not very accurate, even for simple stuff. Second, the translations it picks might no be the form that has survived from the old times. Newer words might have put the use of the older form in disfavour, but it can still exist in the language. If something was the same in a language from 15,000 years ago up to 500 years ago, it won't be picked up in Google Translate, which will pick the current vernacular. Third, they probably give an exact table of the equivalencies they found in the actual paper. It would be easier to check that if they have it available for free. Four, they speak about how words sound, not how the look. So you have to take pronunciation of each language into account, which often can be quite different from what is written.

andolanra 14y ago

I'm going to reserve judgment on the findings themselves until I read the paper (although, having a background in historical linguistics, I've learned to be very skeptical of any claim that posits historical superfamilies.) However, I will complain about the pop-science intro, because the thought that a hunter-gatherer has some chance of understanding a sentence like the one given is laughably preposterous. An Old English speaker would only barely understand it (just as we would only barely understand gief þæm menn ealdan þisne fýr[1]), to say nothing of the many thousands of years of change between us and the hunter-gatherers spoken of. There is a vast difference between 'two words have a statistically provable correspondence' and 'two words are understood as the same word.' [1]: My old English is pretty weak, so I take full responsibility for grammatical errors. Edit: accidentally used 'th' instead of 'þ' in the Old English.

DanBC 14y ago
What do you think about theories like Vilayanur Ramachandran's that some words exist because they are sort of onomatopoeic? (http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/reith2003/lecture4.shtml http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/reith2003/lecture4.shtml)
- duskwuff 14y ago
  I can certainly believe it for one of the examples given, "to spit". The audio examples are clearly imitative, especially in the terminal syllable, which almost always uses a consonant like [p]. (Just like someone spitting.) http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/national/words-that-last/ http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/national/words-...
- nijk 14y ago
  That is someone's theory? That's what 'onomatopoeia' means.
  - DanBC 14y ago
    I've really dumbed it down, and horribly mangled it. Read the link I provided, he does a much better job there. If you don't want to read all of it just search for "Now, remember I said the third thing you have to do in science is show that this is not just some quirk.", and read from the top of that section. 'slush' is onomatopoeic. Is 'axe'? How about 'milk' or 'mother'?

foob 14y ago

In fact, they calculated that words uttered at least 16 times per day by an average speaker had the greatest chance of being cognates in at least three language families. If chance had been the explanation, some rarely used words would have ended up on the list. But they didn’t. I don't think that this logic is valid. It assumes that if the languages had had no common ancestry that any random word would be similarly likely to match between the languages. I'm no linguist but in my experience the most fundamental and commonly used words tend to be shorter, often composed of a single syllable. It also makes sense that the more fundamental words would be created early on and be given simple sounds while later words would be more complicated by necessity. If this is the case then you would expect more random coincidences within the cores of different languages than outside of them. This is also consistent with the fact that most of the examples in the article are very short: thou, give, hand, bark, spit, worm. I think that this would need to be taken into account in the statistical analysis before attempting to draw any conclusion.

ttrreeww 14y ago

“I was really delighted to see ‘to give’ there,” Pagel said. “Human society is characterized by a degree of cooperation and reciprocity that you simply don’t see in any other animal. Verbs tend to change fairly quickly, but that one hasn’t.”

nijk 14y ago
This is the sort of unscientific wishfulness that undermines the analysis. And is directly contradicted by known animal behavior.
- ttrreeww 14y ago
  Your way of living is not a happy one.
  - csallen 14y ago
    It's unfortunate that you believe happiness requires self-delusion.
    - yekko 14y ago
      And you just know more than the experts. Armchair expert...

dmd 14y ago

languagehat writes, over at metafilter: Yeah, this is complete bullshit. Actual linguists weigh in in this LH thread [ http://www.languagehat.com/archives/004994.php http://www.languagehat.com/archives/004994.php ]; Marie-Lucie Tarpent writes: The article announces "Eurasiatic" (a hypothetical supergroup originally suggested by Joseph Greenberg of "Amerind" notoriety) as a major discovery by scientists (not linguists) but seems somewhat confused as to its relation with PIE. It also quotes a few words which the authors interpret as culturally too important to have been lost or replaced, so that they have lasted 15,000 years (one of these words is "bark" (of a tree) for which the authors propose an explanation). Like Renfrew and the Proto-World people, the authors do not seem to differentiate between the survival of a lexical item (although made unrecognizable through millennia of phonological changes) and the survival of the sounds that compose it (which are independent of the meaning of the whole word) (eg Renfrew et al thought that words for 'nephew' had endured almost unchanged for hundreds of years because of the importance of this concept, but actually this longevity is due to the fact that the consonants in the word had been more resistant to change than others, as shown by the behaviour of those consonants in other words totally unrelated semantically to 'nephew'). In any case, the article does not cite any actual forms, only meanings. Read it at your own risk. And Piotr Gąsiorowski says: This is exactly the kind of approach which makes wishful thinking look like science and gets it past reviewers. Even if the numerical methods are basically sound, the data are garbage (obtained by the intuitive eyeballing of reconstructions from the Tower of Babel database -- itself a highly questionable source -- without any actual comparative analysis). No different from ordinary "mass comparison", except perhaps for a tighter control of semantic matches. [...] I realise that one has to start somewhere, but mass comparison is at best of some help in formulating preliminary hypotheses, and mass comparison based on unreliable data is no use at all.

kylebgorman 14y ago
Very few reputable linguists believe in a hypothetical supergroup of "Eurasiatic". The reason that the same linguists are skeptical is that related languages diverge fast enough that after a few millenia, any similarities beyond that are indistinguishable from chance similarity.

meric 14y ago

It says Chinese wasn't included in the seven family of languages. Yet, I, a english and cantonese speaker, couldn't help but notice these two words which sound similar in both languages. Mother is "ma" in English, and also "ma" in Cantonese. Father is "pa" or "dad" in English, and "ba" or "deh" in Cantonese. Remarkably similar, considering both languages are considered by linguists to be practically completely unrelated.

deleted 14y ago
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- meric 14y ago
  Those two aren't original terms, they're merely more formal terms. (e.g. mother and father rather than ma and pa). Cantonese sounds more similar to Classical Chinese than Mandarin does. According to Cantonese wikipedia for "ba"[1] and "ma"[2], in ancient times the word "父" sounds close to the modern day cantonese "爸" (ba) and likewise for "母" and "媽" (ma). [1] http://zh-yue.wikipedia.org/wiki/阿爸 http://zh-yue.wikipedia.org/wiki/阿爸 [2] https://zh-yue.wikipedia.org/wiki/阿媽 https://zh-yue.wikipedia.org/wiki/阿媽 I doubt it can be explained away as merely Western influence. Perhaps it's English that received some Chinese influence? ;) I heard the word "kowtow" originated from China, too.
  - madaxe 14y ago
    The Silk Road (the actual road) caused a high degree of intermingling between mesopotamian and asian populations throughout the last 4,000 years. Rather than having the same stem, it's more likely that these cognates snuck in later.
mkl 14y ago
The words are similar because these are some of the first sounds babies learn to make.

bane 14y ago

Naive review of the interactive infographic thou Altaic, Dravidian, Indo-European and Uralic sound similar enough I can see how Chukchi-Kamchatkan and Kartvelian might end up where they are And then we end up with Inuit-Yupik which sounds so dissimilar, the only thing I hear in common with the others is that it was apparently made by a human to give okay, I can kinda see maybe where Altaic, Inuit-Yupik and Uralic ended up where they are, but they're definitely different sounds Dravidian and Indo-European are a bit more similar, but don't sound like they have anything in common with the others at all hand okay, these are sorta similar, there's a clear m-vowel-n element in most of them but Indo-European gets all "weird" bark Altaic and Uralic may as well be slight accents Inuit-Yupik diverges quite a bit and Indo-European even more. If I squint I can kind of see some similarity with a k-vowel then some other stuff so...okay to spit these are the most similar to my ear, it probably doesn't hurt hat these appear to be onomatopoeia as well. Indo-European just seems to have reversed the bits somewhere along the way. If you squint "spit" in English would fit right in with these. I always come away from these kinds of linguistic analyses scratching my head. Especially once you hear the words in the different languages.

Waiting4Hellban 14y ago

Why couldn't the NYT have transitioned as eloquently as the Washington Post onto the web?

graycat 14y ago

So, suppose we want to know what 'bark' sounded like in the common language 15,000 years ago. Call that common language X. Well, take languages A and B now where 'bark' is shared as a cognate. Now, start with language A now and realize that as we go back in time 15,000 years ago to language X how 'bark' was pronounced changed year by year. Then realize that as we go forward in time from language X 15,000 years ago to language B now, how 'bark' was pronounced has changed year by year. Then the change in how 'bark' is pronounced in languages now is smaller than either the change from language A now to language X 15,000 years ago or from language B now to language X 15,000 years ago. So, how close is how 'bark' is pronounced now to how it was pronounced 15,000 years ago? Closer than to how 'bark' is pronounced between A and B now. So, if 'bark' is pronounced nearly the same in languages A and B now, then it was pronounced nearly the same 15,000 years ago. Thus we have an approximation to how 'bark' sounded 15,000 years ago. It may be that languages A and B have a common ancestor more recently than 15,000 years ago. So, for a better approximation want to pick for languages A and B languages for which we have some hope that their most recent common ancestor was X 15,000 years ago. How to do this? For candidate pairs A and B, look at geographical and genetic distances and pick the most distant pair.

Retric 14y ago
Individual words often migrate between languages even if they don't share a common ancestor.
- graycat 14y ago
  Cute. And there are other issues with what I wrote. For a more careful analysis, would have to do, say, a 'probabilistic' analysis, e.g., where in principle can walk back to the beginning and start over but actually, e.g., with some common assumptions, in a space of dimension 3 or greater, probabilistically keep getting farther from the starting point. Your point should come out in the wash in estimating where there is a common language and how far back if use more than one word, etc. My guess, especially from many of the other comments on this thread, is that the basic data is so bad, noisy, etc. and pronunciation changes so large that the math I outlined, while basically correct, would mostly give such large distances that we wouldn't learn much. Maybe a better solution would be just to assume that the tree of languages would follow the tree of genetic inheritance and, then, via genetic analysis trace that tree. But the article wanted to ask what one of those 'common' words would 'sound' like 15,000 years ago, so I gave a way to get an approximation. The cute part is while 'father' in English sounds a bit different from 'vater' in German, the common ancestor should sound closer to either 'father' or 'vater' than those to two each other, that is, closer rather than farther away. That is, our intuition would be that the sound from 15,000 years ago should be much different from either the current 'father' or 'vater', but with the math model I gave that should be wrong.

sinkasapa 14y ago

Another negative response from a linguist http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4612 http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4612

juhanima 14y ago

I wonder what kind of metrics could be achieved simply by measuring how many mAhs it takes from google translate to translate from one language to another? EDIT: Put simply, converting understandable sentences from one language to another is a lot more than just counting word frequences. Sorry having been mentioned an actual company name there! I just wrote a lenghty text in Finnish and had it translated by an on-line service to English. Suprisingly, it wasn't the vocabulary but is was the structure that mattered. The machince got 99% of the words right, but it lost the meaning in 1/10 of the cases. EDIT2: Not really sure who I am arguing here, on a stale thread, but I just have to finish the thought. So it takes a measureable amount of work to analyze a sentence in a language into an abstract syntax tree. An another amount of work to synthetize that back into an understandable sentence in another language. The average sum of that work for all given sentences is the lingual distance of the two languages. No? Of course all language analyzers and synthetizers are not equally good. What caught my eye, however, was how poor English a network translator was able to produce out of my Finnish. I'm pretty sure (althought the jury is still out on that) that the Russian it produced out of the same origin was remarkably more understandable. The main reason being the liberal word order. I somehow assumed the english synthetizer would have been the top of the line. Turned out if wasn't. Or else the language model was not deep enough, which actually is a more plausible explanation. Ok, thanks!