[HN Gopher] Ultraconserved words point to deep language ancestry... ___________________________________________________________________ Ultraconserved words point to deep language ancestry across Eurasia (2013) Author : benbreen Score : 78 points Date : 2022-01-07 01:52 UTC (21 hours ago) (HTM) web link (www.pnas.org) (TXT) w3m dump (www.pnas.org) | tehchromic wrote: | 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? | kldavis4 wrote: | 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 wrote: | 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 wrote: | RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: | 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) | felix318 wrote: | I also find the Chinese writing system fascinating in that it's | the only one that didn't evolve from representing concepts to | representing sounds. Maybe there is a connection there? | mcguire wrote: | Best not let any linguists hear you say "representing | concepts to representing sounds". All languages represent | sounds as far as I've ever heard from them, and the idea of | "representing concepts" is regarded as a remnant of some very | broken ideas. :-) | | As far as I (a non-linguist, although I've read a bit) know, | there are roughly three ways of writing: alphabets, | syllabaries, and whatever Chinese is (logosyllabic?). | | Alphabets have one grapheme per (roughly) phoneme and | have(AFAIK) developed _once_ : Proto-Siniatic, which led to | Semitic (Hebrew, Arabic, etc.), Phoenician (which developed | into Greek, Latin, etc.) and a few others. Every other | alphabet is a direct or indirect descendant. They typically | have <50 graphemes. | | Chinese is kinda-sorta syllabic, but the language has a great | many one syllable words which have a grapheme mapped directly | to that use. On the other hand there's things like "coral" | (IIRC) which is two syllables and is written with two | characters each of which are not used anywhere else. It, its | descendants, and any other similar languages if there are | any, has some many thousands of graphemes. | | Syllabaries have one grapheme per syllable and are the most | common form of writing, to the extent that it's pretty clear | that they're the normal version of human writing. They | typically have a few hundred graphemes. | | Mayan and cuneiform are a couple of weird cases. They (AFAIK) | are mostly syllabic, but with some logographic-ish parts like | Chinese. But the number of graphemes are pretty firmly in the | syllabary range. | | Tl;dr: Writing is weird and the writing I'm doing now is very | much so. | felix318 wrote: | I'm not sure I understand your comment. Granted, I'm not a | linguist but there is certainly something unique about the | Chinese script. | | I don't know a single word of Chinese, but I followed a | link in a sibling post and came across this: Nu Shu - | which my meager knowledge of Japanese allowed me to | understand that it means "women's writing". | | What is the proper name for the ability to read text | without knowing how to pronounce it? | [deleted] | Jtsummers wrote: | > What is the proper name for the ability to read text | without knowing how to pronounce it? | | "literate". A person can be literate in a language | without being able to speak it or understand the spoken | form, it's the ability to read or write. | felix318 wrote: | This is starting to sound like that debate between | Dennett and Chomsky about whether recursion is a | universal feature of languages. Linguistics is a strange | field. | thaumasiotes wrote: | > I also find the Chinese writing system fascinating in that | it's the only one that didn't evolve from representing | concepts to representing sounds. | | It did. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N%C3%BCshu | | China has had enough cultural continuity to maintain its own | writing system over time. | felix318 wrote: | The same thing happened in Japanese but both countries | refrained from taking the next logical step and throw away | the ideograms. Much of it has to do with the educated elite | wanting to restrict access to knowledge, but it's still | curious that the same thing didn't happen in other | cultures. | thaumasiotes wrote: | Seriously, it's about cultural continuity. Its not about | wanting to restrict access to knowledge; in general the | educated elite wishes the illiterate masses would be more | educated, not less. | | But for example, there is a period in Egyptian history | when royal inscriptions start being written exclusively | in vernacular Egyptian rather than the (incredibly old) | classical form. And that period just happens to be when | the Egyptian throne is taken over by Libyans. | Bayart wrote: | >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 wrote: | 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. | thaumasiotes wrote: | But ancient China wasn't isolated at all. Contact with Persia | was extensive. Contact with India was significant. Han China | interacted with Greeks left behind by Alexander's conquests: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dayuan . The Japanese days of the | week today are clearly a cultural transmission from the West, | mediated through China. | | > I think there is still debate if Chinese writing rose de novo | or was influenced by writing from Sumer. | | I'm not aware of a theory that says Chinese writing was | influenced by Sumer. It's generally felt to be its own thing. | (Though note that Sumerian is about 2,000 years earlier than | our oldest Chinese records, so as a theoretical matter there's | no real way to rule it out. There just isn't any evidence of | influence.) | m33k44 wrote: | > For me, ancient Chinese civilization is so interesting in | large part because of how isolated it is. | | For the Europeans this might be true, but not for the Indians. | There was lot of exchange between Indus and Chinese | civilisations. How do you think Buddhism reached China? | RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: | Buddhism reaching China was in the 1st century CE. | | The Persians ruling over Egypt, the Punjab, and Mesopotamia | was 509 years before that. | | And a 1000 years before that (1500 BC) the Mittani who had | very similars gods and royal names that are very similar to | Sanskrit had an Empire in the Middle East. | | Also, the Maury Empire had close links with the Seleucid | Empire (the war elephants used in many of the Seleucid | campaigns came from India) | | The Indo-Chinese links as can be seen from history are not | nearly as old or as well attested. | enkid wrote: | If we're comparing European contact to Indo-Chinese | contact, your sense of when Europe was integrated with the | Middle East/Mediterranean culture seems a bit off. The | Persia, the Mediterranean and the Black Sea had a lot of | contact prior to the 1st Century but "Europe" as a whole | did not. For example, England was not Christianized until | the 7th Century, Kievan Rus was the 9th Century, | Scandinavia was started in the 10th Century, and the Baltic | Crusades lasted until the 16th Century. Cultural exchange | in "Europe" absolutely is newer than contact between India | and China. | ummonk wrote: | Bronze age Britain was involved in the Bronze age trade | networks. | Ostrogodsky wrote: | History and society in western countries is absurdly Euro- | centric, it sounds like an oxymoron but it should not be. You | must be aware enough to realize what is an absolute truth and | what it is just relative from your POV. The other day I had a | discussion online mocking the concept that "Aboriginal | Australians are so unique because they split from the | Europeans first" as if they cannot say exactly the same. | mcguire wrote: | At least in the English language, many, many subjects are | less Euro-centric and more Anglo-centric: everything is | seen from the vantage of the south-eastern part of a tiny | island in the North Atlantic. What's so dark about the Dark | Ages? Outside of the north-western boundaries of the Roman | empire, not much. | Ostrogodsky wrote: | > everything is seen from the vantage of the south- | eastern part of a tiny island in the North Atlantic. | | Iceland? :) | kerridge0 wrote: | Thanet? | meepmorp wrote: | > How do you think Buddhism reached China? | | Bodhidharma, iirc. | bmc7505 wrote: | I have a theory that if the East and West are ever going to | reconcile their differences, we must find a way to retrace how | these two great civilizations separated in the first place. | What caused our societies to drift apart? Was it primarily | circumstantial factors, like geography and competition for | limited resources? Did religion play a role, like the recent | East-West schism, where early societies self-segregated | according to monotheist and polytheist beliefs? Was it driven | by language, where the East and West favored certain modes of | expression, eventually manifesting as logographs or alphabets? | Did it originate in primordial social contracts, where early | famers and shepherds drove nomadic hunter gatherers further to | the North and East? Probably the original motive lies buried in | the sands of time, but I think these are fascinating questions | and would be curious to know what answers future historians | might come up with. | thisiscorrect wrote: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Roman_relations might be | relevant to your interests. | mlindner wrote: | That's a bit too late. We're talking long before the Romans | existed... | MengerSponge wrote: | Reading about ultraconserved words really makes me hungry for | lox. | mcguire wrote: | Why would you want to ingest liquid oxygen? :-) | ThomasWinwood wrote: | 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 wrote: | 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 | topaz0 wrote: | I remember that languagelog post. Some great critique in there. | willcipriano wrote: | I heard about this paper from a song[0]. | | [0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Md-sVK3yxJY&t=3s | fdgsdfogijq wrote: | 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. | DC-3 wrote: | 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. | sharikous wrote: | 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 wrote: | 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 wrote: | Seems like one of those times when statistics can tell you | anything you want to hear. | trhway wrote: | >"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... | Sharlin wrote: | "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, _aiti_ , 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": _ema_ 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 _emaalus_ "mothership".) ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-01-07 23:00 UTC)