Spit, no, mother (and 20 more words): in human mouths for 15,000 years.
There are 23 words that link modern and extinct languages. If we had used them 15,000 years ago, we would have been understood.
In 2013, a team of researchers from the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Reading compiled a list of 23 oldest words hitherto known, all common to seven ancient “proto-Eurasian” languages.
These languages branched out in hundreds of others, some still spoken today, including English, French, Russian, Hindi and Persian, and others long extinct, such as Latin, Hittite, Sanskrit and Gothic.
These 23 words, researchers estimate, are used about 15,000 years ago: you, I, no, that, we, give, who, this, what, man/male, you, old, mother, hear, hand, fire, pull, black, flow, bark, ash, spit, worm.
If you found yourself beside a campfire 150 centuries ago, alongside a group of hunter-gatherers, chances are they would have understood them. Some are quite obvious, like “mother”, “no”, “what” or “fire”, always so essential to survival, but “worm” and “spit” are a surprisesays .
There is a consensus among linguists that a language, as a rule, cannot survive beyond its 8,000 or 9,000 yearssince languages are common mix and be replaced by other more influentialor transform completely into new languages.
However, these “ultra-conservative” and timeless words show that this is not entirely true, even if the list is made up of just a handful of expressions.
published at the time in PNAS, was led by Mark Pagelfrom the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Reading, in the United Kingdom. Pagel and his team started with 200 words which linguists recognize as the fundamental vocabulary of all languages.
What interested them were the “relatives“, words that have the same meaning, a common origin, and a similar sound in different languages. For example, father (English), padre (Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese), père (French), pater (Latin), vater (German), and pitar (Sanskrit) are cognates.
The researchers focused on seven language families that extend throughout Eurasia and that, according to the hypothesis formulated, share a common ancestor from around 15,000 years ago.
Pagel et al. / PNAS
Map of the approximate regions where languages from the seven Eurasian language families are currently spoken
When analyzing words frequently used in everyday speechidentified those with more likely to have ancestral roots deep.
His approach was to reconstruct protopalavras (the ancestral forms of words) for basic meanings across these language families, creating a dataset from the Languages of the World Etymological Database, (LWED) an etymological database that is part of the project.
Once the roots of these protowords were found, scientists arrived at the list of the 23 oldest words in the world. In their article, they explain why some of them have survived for so long:
- “I” and “you”: Personal pronouns such as “I” and “you” are fundamental in communication and appear in several linguistic families.
- “No”: A negation word like “no” has remained constant across languages, highlighting its essential role in human expression.
- “That one”: Demonstrative pronouns like “that” are crucial in language for specifying and distinguishing objects.
- “Us”: The pronoun “we” is vital to indicating a collective identity and has demonstrated remarkable stability.
- “But”: Verbs like “give” are essential in interactions and exchanges, reflecting their deeply rooted role in societies.
- “Who”: Interrogative pronouns like “who” are fundamental to questioning and have been preserved in several languages.
- “This” and “what”: These words are used frequently in conversation, which makes them less likely to change over time.
- “Man” and “mother”: The nouns that designate fundamental human relationships and characteristics reveal a deep linguistic lineage.
- “Fire” and “hand”: Basic elements of human life and survival, these words have remained practically unchanged.
“Our results suggest a remarkable fidelity in the transmission of some words and give theoretical justification to the search for features of language that can be preserved over vast periods of time and geography,” wrote Pagel and his team.
The study by Pagel and colleagues was not, however, received consensually by the scientific community.
Some linguists are more critical that, for most of the 23 words, the base used by Pagel presented not one, but several “proto” forms by linguistic family, and that it was not clear with what criteria he chose which one to compare — which opened the door to phonetic correspondences obtained by chance.
But, considering the conclusions of Pagel’s study as good, it is interesting to note how these words have survived for 15,00 years, and their value has remained unchanged since the times of the last Ice Age — despite technology, society, religion and everything else having drastically changed.
