“No! You hear me old man – give the Ashes to mother!”
“Pull the black bark [mate] – spit the worm!”It seems that 15,000 years ago the English and Australians would have been able to communicate – even if there is a good deal of ongoing weathering of their cognates.
This discovery has been reinforced by work from the University of Reading which has identified a cache of words that embody prehistoric memes inherited from forest-dwelling hunter-gatherers. Their fireside chats about man and mum, and pulling the worms out of the bark, blackening them in the fire ashes and handing them around, may it seems still be reflected in the vocabularies of the language families that have been grouped together under the heading Euro-Asiatic.
Evolution dilutes infinitely but all traces of the original are hard to eradicate.
And if chimpanzees and humans share a 98% similarity in their stocks of DNA and about 95% in sequential terms, when insertions and deletions are included, it soon becomes clear that bits of us go back a long way. Such that evolutionary biologists have been noted as observing that once the fossil record gets to vertebrate proto-fish, things start to get boring.
The possible survival of bits of word DNA from the deep past is therefore not surprising, though there is a good deal of scepticism among experts about the methodology and outcome specifics of the University of Reading study.
As reported in Science Now, the Reading research team ‘found back in 2007 that most words have about a 50% chance of being replaced by a completely different word every 2000 to 4000 years.
‘Thus the Proto-Indo-European wata, winding its way through wasser in German, water in English, and voda in Russian, became eau [through aqua] in French. But some words, including I, you, here, how, not, and two, are replaced only once every 10,000 or even 20,000 years.
‘The new 2013 study, appearing makes an even bolder statement. The researchers broadened the hunt to cognates from seven major language families, including Indo-European, Eskimo, Altaic (comprising many Oriental languages), and Chukchi-Kamchatkan (a group of non-Russian languages around Siberia), which have been proposed to form an ancient superfamily dubbed Eurasiatic.
'Again, using only the word's frequency and part of speech, the model successfully predicted that a core group of about 23 very common words, used about once per 1000 words in everyday speech, not only persists within each language group, but also sounds similar to the corresponding words in other families.
'The word thou, for example, has similar sound and meaning among all seven language families. Cognates include te or tu in Indo-European languages, t`iin proto-Altaic, and turi in proto-Chukchi-Kamchatkan. The words not, that, we, who, and give were cognates in five families, and nouns and verbs including mother, hand, fire, ashes, worm, hear, and pull, were shared by four.
'Going by the rate of change of these cognates, the model suggests that these words have remained in a similar form since about 14,500 years ago, thus supporting the existence of an ancient Eurasiatic language and its now far-flung descendants’.
I love the idea that we can trace our roots way back and the idea that “spoken language can be transmitted through millennia with enough fidelity to give us information about our early history."
There is another angle to this though.
Although some of the words listed in the Reading study may have been matched by happenstance – or may be the equivalent of a redundant but lingering intestinal appendix [e.g. ‘worm’], the bulk are clearly very common. And this suggests in turn that they have observed Zipf’s ‘Law of least Effort’.
Linguist George Kingsley Zipf, published ‘Human Behaviour and the Principle of Least Effort: An Introduction to Human Ecology’ in 1949. He theorised that many behavioural phenomena followed an inexorable tendency for human beings to polish, conserve and popularize the most commonly used tools, words and meeting places. This principle has been applied to things as disparate as hammers, library classifications and cities.
It leads to rank-size relationships and helps to explain why Auckland continues to grow at the expense of the next ranked cities in New Zealand – Christchurch and Wellington – which are roughly half the size of the primate city. It also goes someway to explaining the seemingly inevitably skewed distribution of wealth in societies where less than 20 percent of the inhabitants generally have more than 80 percent of the wealth.
As for language, ‘the frequency of any word is inversely proportional to its rank in the frequency table. Thus the most frequent word will occur approximately twice as often as the second most frequent word, three times as often as the third most frequent word, etc.
So it is interesting to look at where the ‘Euro-Asiatic’ word fossils rank.
I had a quick go at picking them off the UK English Top 1,000 Words drawn from publications. Not surprisingly ‘worm’ was not there and neither was the word ‘ashes’.
But the rankings and frequencies are quite thought-provoking:
that – rank 10, frequency 55,871
not – rank 20, frequency 34,597 who – rank 51, frequency 11,758
we – rank 54,frequency 11,526
man – rank 76, frequency 7,868
old – 109, frequency 5,569
these – rank 125, frequency 4,372
hand – rank 138, frequency 3,924
those – rank 157, frequency 3,442
mother – rank 187, frequency 3,571
men – rank 207, frequency 2,743
woman [originally ‘wife-man’] – rank 214, frequency 2,697
gave – rank 238, frequency 2,053
whose – rank 294, frequency 1,615
fire – rank 316, frequency 1,461
black – rank 378, frequency 1,233
women – rank 456, frequency 1,031
spot [presumably related to ‘spit’] – rank 864, frequency 482
mother's – rank 929, frequency 476
thee – rank 976, frequency 335
To me they suggest a preoccupation with possession and identity [and patriarchy] which we may also have inherited as deep memes.
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