4 ms·

If you take this tree [1] as canon, English and Czech are fifth cousins, once-removed. If you compared me to my fifth cousin, I probably would look nothing like

by chch 13y ago

If you take this tree [1] as canon, English and Czech are fifth cousins, once-removed. If you compared me to my fifth cousin, I probably would look nothing like him, but I might carry similar traits or certainly similar ancestry. Although the article doesn't convey it very well (and I am skeptical of the finding itself anyway), I believe what they are trying to say is that these words all 'have not changed' in that they all have derived from the same eventual ancestor. That is, the word's pronunciation may have morphed, but the words were never abandoned in favor of new ones. An example here would be the English 'four' vs. the Spanish 'cuatro'. If you believe in the reconstruction of the proto-language Proto-Indo-European (and Wiktionary [2]) then these both derive from the word * kʷetwóres[3]. The Spanish one is a bit easier to understand. * kʷetwóres (PIE) -> quattuor (Latin) -> cuatro (Spanish) Nothing too shocking there, I hope. Latin dropped the "es" off of the end and changed the first vowel a bit, then Spanish simplified the "uo" diphthong into "o" (perhaps through Vulgar Latin? [4]), and reversed or->ro, and of course changed spelling because it's a different language. English, however, took a little bit odder of a path. Somewhere before Proto-Germanic, * kʷetwóres->* petwṓr, which was an irregular change (perhaps to mimic five, which was * pénkʷe->* pémpe [5][6]). Then, a very regular rule, called Grimm's Law [7], kicked in in the first millennium BC, which shifted p sounds toward ɸ sounds ("For English-speakers, it is easiest to think of the sound as an f-sound made only with the lips, instead of the upper teeth and lower lip."[8]). So * petwṓr->* fedwōr (Note the t got vocalized into a d as well) in Proto-Germanic. West Germanic then lost the hard d in the middle, to make * fewōr, which became Old English fēower, into Middle English fower, into Modern English four. So: * kʷetwóres->* petwṓr->* fedwōr->* fewōr->fēower->fower->four Both of these are sets of incremental changes from a common ancestor. Individually, the small changes make some sense (I hope), but once you get several thousand years away from the root, words like "cuatro" and "four" seem like they are completely unrelated by sound, even though they're very related by ancestry. I'm no historical linguist, but hopefully that helps explain why these things sound nothing alike. :) [1]http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4f/IndoEuropeanTree.svg http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4f/IndoEurop... [2]http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Proto-Indo-European/k%CA%B7etw%C3%B3res http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Proto-Indo-European/k... [3] The * indicates that the word is a reconstruction, not actually something attested to in found writings. [4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vulgar_Latin#Monophthongization http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vulgar_Latin#Monophthongization [5] http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Proto-Germanic/fedw%C5%8Dr http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Proto-Germanic/fedw%C... [6] http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Proto-Germanic/fimf http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Proto-Germanic/fimf [7] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grimm%27s_law http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grimm%27s_law (Yes, one of the Brothers Grimm!) [8] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_bilabial_fricative http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_bilabial_fricative

jbattle 13y ago
Thanks - that was a good read! But what about cuatro & four qualifies these as "ultraconserved"? Do these stand in contradiction to other words that arose without some gradual evolution? If a word that evolves in a multitude of branches to arrive in a multitude of various forms is ultraconserved, what is a word that is just kinda conserved, or not conserved at all?
- chch 13y ago
  I personally chose 'four' to write about on a whim, because 'cuatro' sounded different enough, but was relatively explainable in a paragraph. But this only goes back to languages in the Indo-European tree. The paper addressed here says that these 'ultraconserved' words share an ancestor before Indo-European. Via page two: In addition to Indo-European, the language families included Altaic (whose modern members include Turkish, Uzbek and Mongolian); Chukchi-Kamchatkan (languages of far northeastern Siberia); Dravidian (languages of south India); Inuit-Yupik (Arctic languages); Kartvelian (Georgian and three related languages) and Uralic (Finnish, Hungarian and a few others). So, if you can imagine doing that process we did, but backwards, trying to take all these hundreds of languages, living and extinct, in the Indo-European family [1] and making one giant proto language that they all descended from, with a bunch of rules that determine how they morphed to become the child languages, then you get Proto-Indo-European. Now do that again for the other language families above. Then compare the resultant hypothetical languages, and see if they share enough between them to say that they are all children of the same language. This is a lot more controversial, see [2] (what this paper seems to subscribe to) and [3]. What the hypothesis seems to be here (this is speculatory; I haven't read the paper) is "If we look at these proto languages, there seem to be words that are similar enough that they probably are the last remnants of some ultra-proto language that all of these language families descended from". And all words are coined and undergo evolution at some point, but often the popularity of words for the same thing can change, and not all words come from antiquity. Inventions like 'piano' and 'internet' obviously haven't been around very long in the grand scheme of things. But we have other words like 'cater' and 'embrace' that are attributed to Shakespeare [4]. Some words that haven't been conserved: leafworm for caterpillar, wig for war [5], clepe for 'to call', except in the nearly-dead yclept [6], which also contains the ge/y prefix that makes past participles [7]. If you check out [8], you'll spot a bunch of words you probably know, but with senses they don't have anymore. So words are always coming and going, and it seems that this paper is trying to say that certain prevalent words today statistically seem to be from a time before PIE. This reeks a bit of glottochronology [9] to me, though, which is fairly controversial. [1] http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4f/IndoEuropeanTree.svg http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4f/IndoEurop... [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurasiatic_languages http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurasiatic_languages [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-World http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-World [4] http://www.pathguy.com/shakeswo.htm http://www.pathguy.com/shakeswo.htm [5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Changes_to_Old_English_vocabulary http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Changes_to_Old_English_vocabula... [6] http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/yclept http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/yclept [7] http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/y- http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/y- [8] http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:English_archaic_terms http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:English_archaic_terms [9] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glottochronology http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glottochronology

by chch 13y ago

jbattle 13y ago

Thanks - that was a good read! But what about cuatro & four qualifies these as "ultraconserved"? Do these stand in contradiction to other words that arose without some gradual evolution? If a word that evolves in a multitude of branches to arrive in a multitude of various forms is ultraconserved, what is a word that is just kinda conserved, or not conserved at all?

chch 13y ago
I personally chose 'four' to write about on a whim, because 'cuatro' sounded different enough, but was relatively explainable in a paragraph. But this only goes back to languages in the Indo-European tree. The paper addressed here says that these 'ultraconserved' words share an ancestor before Indo-European. Via page two: In addition to Indo-European, the language families included Altaic (whose modern members include Turkish, Uzbek and Mongolian); Chukchi-Kamchatkan (languages of far northeastern Siberia); Dravidian (languages of south India); Inuit-Yupik (Arctic languages); Kartvelian (Georgian and three related languages) and Uralic (Finnish, Hungarian and a few others). So, if you can imagine doing that process we did, but backwards, trying to take all these hundreds of languages, living and extinct, in the Indo-European family [1] and making one giant proto language that they all descended from, with a bunch of rules that determine how they morphed to become the child languages, then you get Proto-Indo-European. Now do that again for the other language families above. Then compare the resultant hypothetical languages, and see if they share enough between them to say that they are all children of the same language. This is a lot more controversial, see [2] (what this paper seems to subscribe to) and [3]. What the hypothesis seems to be here (this is speculatory; I haven't read the paper) is "If we look at these proto languages, there seem to be words that are similar enough that they probably are the last remnants of some ultra-proto language that all of these language families descended from". And all words are coined and undergo evolution at some point, but often the popularity of words for the same thing can change, and not all words come from antiquity. Inventions like 'piano' and 'internet' obviously haven't been around very long in the grand scheme of things. But we have other words like 'cater' and 'embrace' that are attributed to Shakespeare [4]. Some words that haven't been conserved: leafworm for caterpillar, wig for war [5], clepe for 'to call', except in the nearly-dead yclept [6], which also contains the ge/y prefix that makes past participles [7]. If you check out [8], you'll spot a bunch of words you probably know, but with senses they don't have anymore. So words are always coming and going, and it seems that this paper is trying to say that certain prevalent words today statistically seem to be from a time before PIE. This reeks a bit of glottochronology [9] to me, though, which is fairly controversial. [1] http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4f/IndoEuropeanTree.svg http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4f/IndoEurop... [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurasiatic_languages http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurasiatic_languages [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-World http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-World [4] http://www.pathguy.com/shakeswo.htm http://www.pathguy.com/shakeswo.htm [5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Changes_to_Old_English_vocabulary http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Changes_to_Old_English_vocabula... [6] http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/yclept http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/yclept [7] http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/y- http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/y- [8] http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:English_archaic_terms http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:English_archaic_terms [9] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glottochronology http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glottochronology