[PLUG-TALK] Words With Same Meanings for 15K Years

[John Jason Jordan]

On Tue, 7 May 2013 05:59:49 -0700 (PDT)
Rich Shepard <rshepard at appl-ecosys.com> dijo:

>For John and others interested in language here's a report of some
>words that have maintained the same pronunciation and meaning in
>different language groups for more than 15,000 years:

First I'd like to point out that Mark Pagel is not even a linguist. His
field is evolutionary biology. Within his field his specialty is
statistical methodology.

Second, I'd like to offer an demonstration (Trask & Millar, 2007, pp.
274–5) proposing a relationship between Hawaiian and Ancient Greek:

Hawaiian		Ancient Greek
aeto	'eagle'	aetos	'eagle'
noonoo	'thought'	nous	'thought'
manao	'think'	manthano	'learn'
mele	'sing'	melos	'melody'
lahui	'people'	laos	'people'
meli	'honey'	meli	'honey'
kau	'summer'	kauma	'heat'
mahina	'month'	men	'moon'
kia	'pillar'	kion	'pillar'
hiki	'come'	hikano	'arrive'

Pretty impressive data, right? Are Hawaiian and Ancient Greek
genetically related? Or did one of them borrow words from the other, or
both from a third language? Did a Greek ship reach Hawaii a couple
thousand years ago?

In fact, the above table lists a set of pure coincidences. I couldn't
express it better than Trask & Millar:

"It is possible that you find this very hard to believe. Many people
with little experience of comparative linguistics are incredulous when
they are told that such impressive-looking lists are the result of
sheer coincidence; they protest indignantly, 'But this just can't be
coincidence. Look at the words for 'honey' - they're absolutely
identical! There must be another explanation.' Even a number of
professional linguists have taken this line, and insisted hotly in the
literature that data-sets like [the above] just have to be considered
evidence for some kind of connection.

Well, sorry, but they're wrong. Every language has thousands of
meanings to provide forms for, and only a small number of speech-sounds
to construct those forms, and hence, by the ordinary laws of
probability, any arbitrary languages will always exhibit a number of
such coincidences - maybe only eight or ten, maybe dozens, depending
chiefly on how similar their phonologies are and on how willing you are
to accept some pair of words as similar. Failure to appreciate this
truth is merely one more manifestation of that very widespread human
failure to understand the laws of probability."

As a statistician Pagel should have known better.

And finally, I'd like to offer some facts and theories about language
relationships in Eurasia.

The field of historical linguistics is only a couple hundred years old.
The first great breakthrough is credited to William Jones in 1786 when
he proposed a relationship among Ancient Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit,
the latter being seriously studied for the first time by Europeans
during that era. Ultimately linguists compiled evidence for 436 current
languages descended from Proto-Indo-European. While that sounds like a
lot of languages, it is only a fraction of the roughly 6500 languages
currently spoken, although their speakers comprise nearly half the
world's population. 

The generally accepted theory is that Proto-Indo-European was spoken
roughly 5700 years ago in the Caucasus. Part of the foundation for this
theory is that the archeological record shows that it was roughly at
this time that the wheel and the wagon were developed, and horses were
domesticated. This explains the fact that the Indo-Europeans got
around; even before the colonial era descendant languages were spoken
as far east as present day China (Tocharian).

However, there is controversy; the timelines range from 3000 to 10,000
years ago, and various homelands have been proposed, including Sweden,
India, Turkey and the Sinai. 

If we want to get even more controversial we could consider Nostratic.
There is some evidence for a relationship between Proto-Indo-European
and Proto-Uralic (the ancestor of Finnish, Estonian and Hungarian).
According to the theory Proto-Indo_European and Proto-Uralic were
sister languages descended from an original language, dubbed Nostratic
by the proponents. However, the evidence is thin and few linguists buy
the story. 

And now Pagel wants me to go back 15,000 years based on 23 words.
Sorry. Not enough evidence. I'd sooner believe that those languages
borrowed the words from itinerant Indo-Europeans on horseback. Or more
likely, just coincidence. 

References
Trask, L., & Millar, R. M. (2007). Trask’s Historical Linguistics (2nd
ed.). Hodder Arnold.