You, hear me! Give this fire to that old man. Pull the black worm off the bark and give it to the mother. And no spitting in the ashes!
Surprisingly, if you said these strange sentences to your ancient ancestors, say 15,000 years ago, they might understand you. Researchers in England recently identified 23 words (some of which are in bold above) as words that have stood the test of time, being passed down in various language families all over Europe and Asia for as many as 15,000 years. It is pretty amazing that this many words have survived so long. Even though they have changed somewhat overall, these 23 identified words have remained largely unchanged compared to most words. This is more impressive when you know most words (in any language) usually last no longer than 5,000 to 9,000 years, before they become unrecognizable when compared to the word origin. But not only have these special words survived in English, but these 23 words have cognates (words with a similar origin, sound, and meaning) in 7 families of languages including languages like Turkish, Mongolian, Finnish, Hungarian, Italian, French, and Sanskrit. The existence of these long-lived words suggests there was a “proto-Eurasiatic” language, a language once spoken by people who went on to live all over Eurasia (Europe and Asia). This long ago spoken language, from which these words originate is now connected to the native tongues of more than half the world’s current population!
The researchers at the University of Reading in England, who produced this study, found that very commonly used words (i.e. those used more than 1 in every 1,000 words in everyday speech) in Eurasiatic languages were much more likely to a show strong connection to this long ago “proto-Eurasiatic” language. I don’t know how the word “worm” made it into the group of 23 words based on that information, because I certainly don’t use the word worm very often and certainly not 1 in 1,000 words! But I guess I have to just believe the researchers that this word stood the test of time. You and I will also have to believe these researchers about the similarities between these words in various languages, because if we look just at the written versions of these words some seem more similar than others, for example, “man” in Turkish is “adam,” in French it is “homme,” in Finnish it is “mies,” but in Hungarian it is “férfi.” The Hungarian word for ‘man’ doesn’t seem at all connected to the English word to me, but I am just looking at the written and not the spoken version of this word. Likely the linguists doing this study were looking at deeper phonetic connections than you or I know about. Either way, this is all pretty impressive. It highlights for me once again how interconnected we all are through language and how important it is to learn many many new words (in English) as just these 23 cognates (thou, I, not, that, we, to give, who, this, what, man/male, ye, old, mother, to hear, hand, fire ,to pull, black, to flow, bark, ashes, to spit, worm) aren’t going to get you very far in conversation!
To find out more about this interesting research check out this article: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/national/words-that-last/. At this link you can also listen to how some of these 23 long-lasting words sound (similarly) in various languages.
