Wyz_sub10

In Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs and Steel" he notes that word origins are often used when trying to determine the domestic ancestry of an animal.

I don't remember the details, but he mentions that sheep were probably domesticated in Asia and introduced to Europe because of the similar etymology of 'sheep' in many diffferent regions.

By contrast, 'cow' (I think) has very distinct etymology and was, therefore, likely to have been domesticated independently in different areas.

He also shows how language is used to determine the migration patterns os Austronesian peoples.

lpetrich

Where? I don't recall him ever claiming that.

And this online American Heritage Dictionary page points to some nice introductions to ancestral Indo-European and ancestral Semitic.

As peteyh has pointed out, it is reasonable to suppose that the ancestral population of our species had had language. No full-scale society has ever been found to lack full-scale language. In fact, our species seems to have a "language instinct" -- parts of our brains are specialized for various sorts of language processing.

Full-scale language could be defined as anything that English could be translated into, with allowances for vocabulary differences. Partial language is something that is grammatically incomplete. For example, dogs can learn some commands, but not much more, if anything at all. Thus, they learn an extremely "incomplete" language. Ape language experiments reveal significantly more linguistic competence, but what they learn is nevertheless grammatically incomplete -- it's not clear that they are able to compose full-scale sentences.

Wyz_sub10

I'm at the office now, but I'll check it out tonight.

missus_gumby

A long time ago I heard (on BBC radio 4) an anthropologist mention there was one (and only one) expression common to all cultures on the planet: the smile. Apparently, the smile is the one thing that shares the same meaning for everyone.

Martin

chloecutey

One thing we can be fairly certain about:

Communication patterns had to be complex enough to co-ordinate the big-game persistence hunts that date to the times of Homo erectus (or maybe earlier homo sapiens might be more accurate... I haven't looked this up in a good while). For reference, look at the sites of Torralba and Ambrona, both in Spain. Again, I may be hopelessly out-of-date, but from what I remembered the sites were arguably attributed to Homo Erectus.

Monkeybot

Check out Stephen Pinker's The Language Instinct if you're really curious about the spread and development of languages. Also count me in as another vote for Guns Germs and Steel -- the way he traces language development during the Austronesian expansion was totally fascinating.

Well, I don't necessarily think so -- just look at how the word for "father" has changed across languages and generations. (I don't have the list on me right now, though, sorry.) Stuff like "pere" and "pater" and "fater" and such. Also complicating things is, we don't know the particulars of ancient languages if they haven't been written down. Like, what were the aborigines speaking 1000s of years ago? There's no written record so we sort of have to reconstruct guesses from the languages they speak today.

Also, the word for food doesn't necessarily have to remain constant -- for example in Japanese they often use the word "gohan" to mean "food," but it can also mean just "rice." See what I'm getting at? I think it's possible (and I admit I have never actually researched this, so I don't know how strong or weak a possibility) that the word for food COULD have changed in this manner -- as the mainstays of different diets around the world changed, so might have the generic word for food.

Just my early-in-the-morning $0.02

lpetrich

Here are words from 1 to 10 in many languages; notice the patterns of similarity and difference.

Also, for "father", check out this etymology. To get the other ones, change the 33 to some number between 1 and 67 -- "mother" is 32.

Monkeybot

Thanks for the informative links, LP.

capnkirk

You are both right and wrong. You are right that there are no words that are exactly the same in all those languages, but there are many that are similar enough in all those languages to indicate the presence of a common root. Linguists call them cognates, and just one example is: mother English, madre Spanish, mutterGerman, mere French, metre Greek. etc. This case illustrates parallel development from the Latin root word (which in turn derives from the Greek). This example illustrates evolution over a relatively short 2000 years. Tracing etymology over extended periods becomes more problematic because most of the languages are no longer spoken; others had no written form and were therefore not preserved for study.

Etymologists have traced the evolution of language to a surprising degree, but can only reach back about 10,000 years to the earliest surviving written accounts. Even over that span, evolution has changed even the most generic words to a point that without being able to see each step along the way, you would not recognize any similarity between the earliest and latest versions if placed side by side (even with the aid of using the same phonetic alphabet).

lpetrich

First off, the Latin word for "mother" is only the ancestor of the Romance words. It is not the ancestor of the Germanic words, and the Greek word is not the ancestor of any of the others listed.

Also, the oldest written language was in Sumeria, what's now southeastern Iraq, about 5000 years ago -- not 10,000 years ago.

Sumerian, however, has no known relatives, and the first ones with known relatives are Ancient Egyptian, starting soon after, and Akkadian, the first recorded Semitic language, in about 2300 BCE. Semitic and Egyptian are part of a bigger family called Afro-Asiatic.

The first recorded examples of Indo-European languages are:

Anatolian: Hittite in 1750 BCE But it disappeared in the disorders of ~1250 BCE.

Indo-Aryan: Recorded in the Mitanni Kingdom of eastern Anatolia about 1500 BCE; soon disappears. The Vedas are composed in India a few centuries later; they are transmitted by professional chanters for some centuries before they are written down.

Greek: Written in two scripts! The first one was the Linear B script used in 1450-1200 BCE; it was forgotten when the Mycenaean palaces were destroyed in 1200 BCE. The second one is the familiar alphabet, which was acquired ~800 BCE.

Italic: ~600 BCE. Latin was the only survivor of the early Italic ones, and it in turn became the Romance languages of the one-time Roman Empire.

All of the others start getting written records at about this time or later -- sometimes much later, as in the case of Baltic (1500 CE).