Be Careful What you Say

...some future archaeologist might be listening.

Tablet of Shamash.
Image source: British Museum.

Because my job involves using language to communicate, I've started studying the history and use of English as a form of communication. It turns out that English is one of many Indo-European languages stemming from the same ancient root language. This language spread as groups migrated from the region the the north and east of the Black Sea (part of modern day Ukraine, Russian, and Georgia) in multiple directions. These migrations occurred approximately 6,000 years ago for various reasons — the nature of the geography, the rise of animal husbandry, and patterns of conquest.

And as various groups made their way out of the region, they took words from the proto-language and morphed them over time in various ways. The archaeology of those changes are predictable and their effects demonstrate commonality in languages as diverse as Greek, Latin, early Germanic languages, and into all modern European languages. (See chart, below.) Indeed, the same language family produced such far-flung languages as Sanskrit and Hindi.

What is fascinating is that in comparing all these languages, we learn that English is a great language sponge. It absorbs words rather than rejecting them. As a result, English has an enormous vocabulary with words coming from early Germanic, Anglo-Saxon, Latin, and Greek, just to name a few.

English is also very ready to accommodate foreign words, and as it has become an international language, it has absorbed vocabulary from a large number of other sources. —Oxford Dictionaries on whether English has the largest vocabulary.

The evidence for this exists in our day-to-day speech. For instance, you move your foot when you walk making you a pedestrian.

Image from Prof. Wheeler's page on the history of English.

Foot and ped- are "cognates," meaning: "Having the same linguistic derivation as another; from the same original word or root." Other surprising cognates include: cent- and hundred, and ward and guard. English is full of words which derive from the same original proto-Indo-European language, but came from different sources. Its these cognates which allow linguists to delve into the history and origins of our language.

Recently, scientists have uncovered root words (23 of them) which span an even larger set of language groups all over Europe, Asia, India, Africa, and into Alaska and go back as far as 15,000 years:

A research team led by Mark Pagel at the University of Reading in England has identified 23 “ultraconserved words” that have remained largely unchanged for 15,000 years. Words that sound and mean the same thing in different languages are called “cognates”. These are five words that have cognates in at least four of the seven Eurasiatic language families [including Altaic, Chukchi-Kamchatkan, Dravidian, Inuit-Yupik, Indo-European, Kartvelian, and Uralic]. —Washington Post, by Wilson Andrews and David Brown

An impressive finding that demonstrates just how interconnected the human species is and why we're able to communicate at all.

English is a wonderful, flexible, and utilitarian language with a fascinating history. For an accessible and enjoyable account of that history listen to the History of English Podcast.

Your, Bear