New research by SFI External Professor Mark Pagel and his team at Reading University shows that Ice Age people living in Europe 15,000 years ago might have used forms of common words including I, you, we, man, and bark that in some cases could still be recognized today.
Using statistical models, the researchers predicted that certain words would have changed so slowly over long periods of time as to retain traces of their ancestry for up to ten thousand or more years. These words point to the existence of a linguistic super-family tree that unites seven major language families of Eurasia: Indo-European, Uralic, Altaic, Kartvelian, Dravidian, Chuckchee-Kamchatkan, and Eskimo-Aleut.
Previously linguists have relied solely on studying shared sounds among words to identify those that are likely to be derived from common ancestral words, such as the Latin pater and the English father. A difficulty with this approach is that two words might have similar sounds just by accident, such as the words team and cream.
To remedy this problem, the researchers showed that a subset of words used frequently in everyday speech are more likely to be retained over long periods of time. The team used this method to predict words likely to have shared sounds, giving greater confidence that when such sound similarities are discovered they do not merely reflect the workings of chance.
"The way we use a certain set of words in everyday speech is something common to all human languages," says Pagel. "We discovered that numerals, pronouns, and special adverbs are replaced far more slowly, with linguistic half-lives of once every 10,000 or even more years. As a rule of thumb, words used more than about once per thousand in everyday speech were seven to ten times more likely to show deep ancestry in the Eurasian super-family."
Read the paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (May 6, 2013)