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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

#31

Post by Radim »

mcbits wrote: post #28
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...

I'd say the first three are completely off; "concern" & "care" better (I also heard "grit"), but not quite there.

Re: Ultraconserved words in use since the last Ice Age

#32

Post by beagle3 »

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.

Similar to Pineapple which is basically "ananas" in every language except English (pineapple) and Spanish (piña); though "ananas" is also accepted, but rarely used, in Spanish, so English stands alone.

[0] https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/134659/why-is-pi...

Re: Ultraconserved words in use since the last Ice Age

#33

Post by yoodenvranx »

rabboRubble wrote: post #11
mturmon wrote: post #8

My favorite example of this is the word "squirrel," which is originally from ancient Greek, σκίουρος (lexical translation: skiouros, which means shadow-tailed). Somehow the notion that Socrates would use approximately the same (rather unlikely) word for this animal that I do is fascinating.

My Japanese native language speaker in college had an obsession with the word "squirrel". We spent an entire year trying to teach her how to pronounce it. Ssss-ka-wuh-rrr-llll

I am German and 'squirrel' is the one English word I just can't pronounce. I am very good at all the other words, but that one stumps me.

Re: Ultraconserved words in use since the last Ice Age

#34

Post by jacobolus »

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.

Cacao and chocolate both come from Nahuatl words (cacaua and xocolatl, respectively, though note that there was also a drink called cacahuaatl: “atl” = water).

According to Wiktionary the xocolatl case is actually a bit uncertain (not much evidence of that word in use before 1750), and there are some competing theories that it was maybe related to the word for a stirring stick, or maybe descended from the Yucatec Maya word chocol (hot). https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/chocolate

The version I like is the Maya version from the south of Mexico, now called tascalate (not sure what the Maya name was, or exactly what the etymology is there – the “ate” part comes from the same Nahuatl word for water).

But that’s all sort of beside the point that the word chocolate (and cacao) are fairly recent words, which were spread rapidly around the world mostly from one source, so the name was adopted pretty much everywhere as a loanword, and doesn’t change too much between languages.

Re: Ultraconserved words in use since the last Ice Age

#35

Post by TheCoreh »

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]…

So basically words organically developed Huffman coding?

Re: Ultraconserved words in use since the last Ice Age

#36

Post by ruste »

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.

Persian - چای (Chai)

Re: Ultraconserved words in use since the last Ice Age

#37

Post by jacobolus »

yoodenvranx wrote: post #33
rabboRubble wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My Japanese native language speaker in college had an obsession with the word "squirrel". We spent an entire year trying to teach her how to pronounce it. Ssss-ka-wuh-rrr-llll

I am German and 'squirrel' is the one English word I just can't pronounce. I am very good at all the other words, but that one stumps me.

Can you handle “square” and “girl”?

Re: Ultraconserved words in use since the last Ice Age

#38

Post by xaedes »

yorwba wrote: post #27
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).

Oh; thank you for the great link! You can even "Select another database"; they have a lot. Nice resource.

Re: Ultraconserved words in use since the last Ice Age

#39

Post by yoodenvranx »

jacobolus wrote: post #37
yoodenvranx wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am German and 'squirrel' is the one English word I just can't pronounce. I am very good at all the other words, but that one stumps me.

Can you handle “square” and “girl”?

Yes, but squirrel is still impossible.

Re: Ultraconserved words in use since the last Ice Age

#40

Post by pluma »

yoodenvranx wrote: post #33
rabboRubble wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My Japanese native language speaker in college had an obsession with the word "squirrel". We spent an entire year trying to teach her how to pronounce it. Ssss-ka-wuh-rrr-llll

I am German and 'squirrel' is the one English word I just can't pronounce. I am very good at all the other words, but that one stumps me.

You're not alone. "Squirrel" pops up as that one word most Germans seem to be insecure about even if they otherwise speak fluent English.

I think this is mostly because Germans are generally taught RP, where it is pronounced /ˈskwɪɹəl/ (skwe-rel). The American /ˈskwɝl̩/ (skwerl with a very faint r) is considerably easier to pronounce for German speakers.

Because neither the English /w/ nor the English /ɹ/ exist in German and because they're both pronounced in close proximity to each other, the combination tends to be confusing to pronounce (as with combinations of th and s/z).

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