The Reach Of Speech

Meanderer

Meanderer

Supreme Member
Ancestral man's first conversations likely about tools, food, study finds

"Just when our ancestors started talking is something that's still debated. We can't exactly ask them, after all. But a new study published in Nature Communications suggests that the earliest language may have been born out of the need for butchering tools starting between 1.8 million and 2.5 million years ago".

http://triblive.com/usworld/nation/7586741-74/tools-language-ancestors#axzz3PBPxxc31
%D0%9A%D0%B0%D0%BC%D0%B5%D0%BD%D0%BD%D1%8B%D0%B9_%D0%B2%D0%B5%D0%BA_(1).jpg








 

Josiah09 said:
Certainly a reasonable speculation about how language may have arisen. It's fascinating to speculate as to what might be the oldest surviving word root that has persisted to the present day.
'
Click to expand...
Revealed: The world's oldest words... and the ones that will disappear


http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencet...-The-worlds-oldest-words--ones-disappear.html


The top 20 oldest words in order of age


20. TO DIE
19. HAND
18. NIGHT
17. TO GIVE
16. STAR
15. WHERE
14. WHAT
13.THOU
12. NEW
11. TONGUE
10. NAME
09. ONE
08. HOW
07. FOUR
06. WE
05. FIVE
04. I
03. THREE
02 TWO
01. WHO



 

Vivjen said:
This is surreal.....how can anybody work that out?
Click to expand...

"The words, highlighted in a new PNAS paper, all come from seven language families of Europe and Asia. It’s believed that they were part of a linguistic super-family that evolved from a common ancestral language.

Mark Pagel of the University of Reading’s School of Biological Sciences led the research. He and his colleagues began with 200 words that linguists agree are common among all European and Asian languages. They then determined which sounded similar and had comparable meanings across the different languages.

Next, Pagel and his team determined the roots of those words, resulting in the list of 23".

....a highly educated guess.
 
Meanderer said:
"The words, highlighted in a new PNAS paper, all come from seven language families of Europe and Asia. It’s believed that they were part of a linguistic super-family that evolved from a common ancestral language.

Mark Pagel of the University of Reading’s School of Biological Sciences led the research. He and his colleagues began with 200 words that linguists agree are common among all European and Asian languages. They then determined which sounded similar and had comparable meanings across the different languages.

Next, Pagel and his team determined the roots of those words, resulting in the list of 23".

....a highly educated guess.
Click to expand...
me go tell tribe!
 
How come the 20 oldest words happen to contemporary words in the English language? I would have thought they world have started by looking at some of the oldest written languages and worked from there and we wouldn't be talking about any contemporary words but maybe a few common syllables.
 
The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart
by Jack Gilbert


How astonishing it is that language can almost mean,
and frightening that it does not quite. Love, we say,
God, we say, Rome and Michiko, we write, and the words
Get it wrong. We say bread and it means according
to which nation. French has no word for home,
and we have no word for strict pleasure. A people
in northern India is dying out because their ancient
tongue has no words for endearment. I dream of lost
vocabularies that might express some of what
we no longer can. Maybe the Etruscan texts would
finally explain why the couples on their tombs
are smiling. And maybe not. When the thousands
of mysterious Sumerian tablets were translated,
they seemed to be business records. But what if they
are poems or psalms? My joy is the same as twelve
Ethiopian goats standing silent in the morning light.
O Lord, thou art slabs of salt and ingots of copper,
as grand as ripe barley lithe under the wind's labor.
Her breasts are six white oxen loaded with bolts
of long-fibered Egyptian cotton. My love is a hundred
pitchers of honey. Shiploads of thuya are what
my body wants to say to your body. Giraffes are this
desire in the dark. Perhaps the spiral Minoan script
is not a language but a map. What we feel most has
no name but amber, archers, cinnamon, horses and birds.

From THE GREAT FIRES: POEMS, 1982-1992 (Alfred A. Knopf, 1994)
 
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