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Ultraconserved words in use since the last Ice Age

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Re: Ultraconserved words in use since the last Ice Age

#21

Post by rabboRubble »

lacampbell wrote: post #16
rabboRubble wrote: post #3

I really like the word "tea" across languages. Japanese - cha Chinese - chá Thailand - chā Russian - чай (chay) Turkish - Çay (chai) Sri Lanka Sinhala - තේ (tē) Arabic - شاي (shay) German - tee English - tea! You have to go out of your way to find a language where "tea" deviates from those patterns.

They all derive from two sources Mandarin - chá Hokkien - tê

Very cool about the Hokkien angle. I have near zero exposure to Hokkien and didn't realize the cha2 / te difference between the 2 dialects. Thank you! I've always been puzzled by the shift from the "ch" to "t" sound as the word migrated westward. I had always attributed the shift to a natural progressive change from language to language. Having two different original sources makes much more sense!

Re: Ultraconserved words in use since the last Ice Age

#22

Post by schoen »

ajross wrote: post #15
jacobolus wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As common words go, this one isn’t that old though. Dates from the late 1st millennium, and has mostly been spread around in the past 500 years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etymology_of_tea I think it’s similar with other products originating largely from a single source, e.g. “chocolate”, “ramen”, “tofu”, “wine”, “cashmere”, “curry”, “khaki”, “shampoo”, ...

But nothing is that simple. Chocolate got mixed up, for example. It's an aztec compound word for the drink made from the plant (xocolatl == "bitter water", per wikipedia). The original term for the plant itself in the sense we use it was the unrelated mayan word cacao.

I used to have a folk etymology for chocolate as cacao + lait (or latte), which feels very plausible despite being historically incorrect!

Re: Ultraconserved words in use since the last Ice Age

#23

Post by icebraining »

trynumber9 wrote: post #6
rabboRubble wrote: post #3

I really like the word "tea" across languages. Japanese - cha Chinese - chá Thailand - chā Russian - чай (chay) Turkish - Çay (chai) Sri Lanka Sinhala - තේ (tē) Arabic - شاي (shay) German - tee English - tea! You have to go out of your way to find a language where "tea" deviates from those patterns.

But that's because the Europeans all adopted the word later. From etymology online: The distribution of the different forms of the word in Europe reflects the spread of use of the beverage. The modern English form, along with French thé, Spanish te, German Tee, etc., derive via Dutch thee from the Amoy form, reflecting the role of the Dutch as the chief importers of the leaves (through the Dutch East India Company, f…

Interestingly, we the Portuguese are the exception, using Chá despite being at the Western extreme of the continent: http://i.imgur.com/M4vrWr1.png

Which probably means we got it earlier thanks to our trips to India and China in the 1500s, but then failed to capitalize on its sale to the rest of Europe.

Re: Ultraconserved words in use since the last Ice Age

#24

Post by chch »

Here's a previous thread from when this was originally posted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5669179

I remember, because I made two of my most researched comments there [1]. :)

I'm no historical linguist, but I'd take this finding with a bunch of grains of salt. Eurasiatic language families that seek to combine, say, Proto-Indo-European [2] and Altaic [3] languages are pretty controversial, and in general this paper reeks a bit of glottochronology [4], which is a pretty controversial topic in historical linguistics itself.

Wikipedia's Eurasiatic language page actually even has a large section about this very article, including some refutations[5].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5670947

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Indo-European_language

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altaic_languages

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glottochronology

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurasiatic_languages#Pagel_et_....

Re: Ultraconserved words in use since the last Ice Age

#25

Post by tempodox »

Radim wrote: post #19

The link between a word's length and its "usefulness" is fascinating too. The shorter the word, the more central, fundamental and frequent its use, as a rule of thumb. [0] One glaring exception is "conscientiousness" -- a personality trait that has been the nr. 1 performance predictor in jobs that require results (execution as opposed to ideas), across time and industries. Clearly central, but 17 characters! O_o [0]…

“conscientiousness” is quite young (stolen from Latin, i.e. when the Romans conquered the world). If it was significant before, it might have been shorter.

Re: Ultraconserved words in use since the last Ice Age

#26

Post by rmetzler »

rabboRubble wrote: post #3

I really like the word "tea" across languages. Japanese - cha Chinese - chá Thailand - chā Russian - чай (chay) Turkish - Çay (chai) Sri Lanka Sinhala - තේ (tē) Arabic - شاي (shay) German - tee English - tea! You have to go out of your way to find a language where "tea" deviates from those patterns.

You should lookup the word for pineapple in other languages. English is the outlier, most (or all, IIRC) call it "ananas".

Re: Ultraconserved words in use since the last Ice Age

#27

Post by yorwba »

kijin wrote: post #18

The article says that words like "fire", "ashes", "bark", and "worm" could be 15K years old, but doesn't provide any idea of how they might have sounded back then. The original paper linked at the bottom doesn't seem to help in that regard, either. Is this something that we simply cannot know with current methods? Ice Age people obviously didn't leave any sound recordings, but surely some of the sounds would have to…

I think I found an online interface to the database they used: http://starling.rinet.ru/cgi-bin/query.cgi?root=config&morph...

Searching for "fire" gives a bunch of different results; I have no idea which one they used. The one closest to English is probably "*ṗVxwV" (where V stands for any vowel, I believe).

Re: Ultraconserved words in use since the last Ice Age

#28

Post by mcbits »

Radim wrote: post #19

The link between a word's length and its "usefulness" is fascinating too. The shorter the word, the more central, fundamental and frequent its use, as a rule of thumb. [0] One glaring exception is "conscientiousness" -- a personality trait that has been the nr. 1 performance predictor in jobs that require results (execution as opposed to ideas), across time and industries. Clearly central, but 17 characters! O_o [0]…

Not perfect synonyms, but we do have shorter words in the same semantic ballpark: virtue, vigor, zeal, concern, care, pains...

Re: Ultraconserved words in use since the last Ice Age

#29

Post by schoen »

iagooar wrote: post #17
avz wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You have to go out of your way to find a language where "tea" deviates from those patterns. Well, there you go: Lithuanian: arbata, https://translate.google.com/#en/lt/tea Polish: herbata, https://translate.google.com/#en/pl/tea Aymara: pulu, https://ay.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulu

Yet in Polish the word "czaj" also exists and it means a very strong tea. Herbata seems to come from Latin, as it relates to herbs.

Wikipedia says that the -ta in Lithuanian and Polish is from Latin thea, from the phrase herba thea ('tea herb'), so there is still a morpheme in common with the other languages in this case!

Re: Ultraconserved words in use since the last Ice Age

#30

Post by mootothemax »

For a good etymological mystery, it's hard to beat "dog."

Not only is the word "dog" of unknown origin, its equivalents in Spanish and various Slavic languages also apparently appeared from nowhere.

http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=dog

If that's not fun enough, there's an extinct Aboriginal language from Australia which has a word for dog. That word is also "dog" - apparently pronounced the same as in English, and a complete coincidence:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mbabaram_language

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