5 ms·
Dolgopolsky list
- aerique 12y agoBoy, that put me on a Wikipedia hike trail on subjects I had little to no knowlegde of. Thanks!
- praptak 12y agoRelated: http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/linguists-identify-15000-year-old-ultraconserved-words/2013/05/06/a02e3a14-b427-11e2-9a98-4be1688d7d84_story.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/lingui...
- ar-jan 12y agoThe research behind that article is extremely problematic. See e.g. [1] and [2]. The WP article adds its own overinterpretations to it, such as as the nonsensical "But if you went back 15,000 years and spoke these words to hunter-gatherers in Asia in any one of hundreds of modern languages, there is a chance they would understand at least some of what you were saying." 1: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4612 http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4612 2: http://languagesoftheworld.info/bad-linguistics/ultraconserved-words-reveal-linguistic-macro-families.html http://languagesoftheworld.info/bad-linguistics/ultraconserv...
- riffraff 12y agomost words seem to be rather fundamental concepts except: nit? I wonder why would that be so timeless a word.
- ghshephard 12y agoThat's easy - until very, very recent human history, the louse/lice/nit has been a constant (and really annoying) companion of much of humanity. Not surprising the word stabilized in populations that used it all the time. What's interesting - is you could could probably use "semantic stability" to track preponderance of various pests, diseases, etc... in various populations/locations. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louse http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louse This would also suggest that the word might destabilize in societies/civilizations which have managed to reduce the louse impact.
- sukilot 12y agoBut more consistent part of life than "day" and "night" and "light"?
- ghshephard 12y agoMight have been more consistently used.
- agumonkey 12y agoI was looking for such a thing for ages and never came even near that list.
- legulere 12y agoAlready the third one was replaced in english not that long ago: you replaced thou
- bhousel 12y agoFrom what I understand, "you" was you-formal, and "thou" was you-familiar. (They weren't completely the same word) However, IANAL (linguist)
- dragonwriter 12y ago"You" was plural and/or formal, "thou" was the singular/informal form and so, per the list, "thou" was item #3 of the list of "words least likely to be replaced as the language evolves".
- phuff 12y agoMore commonly linguists talk about Swadesh lists. For the most complete modern collection of Swadesh-like lists and a program/algorithm for automatically generating a language family tree from them see: http://asjp.clld.org http://asjp.clld.org
- ar-jan 12y agoWhile ASJP is used to explore potential relationships, it should be noted that it cannot reliably determine language relatedness by itself. The gold standard for that is still the comparative method. [1] 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_method_%28linguistics%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_method_%28linguist...