[HN Gopher] Ultraconserved words point to deep language ancestry...
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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".)
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