Ultraconserved words point to deep language ancestry across Eurasia

Abstract

The search for ever deeper relationships among the World's languages is bedeviled by the fact that most words evolve too rapidly to preserve evidence of their ancestry beyond 5,000 to 9,000 y. On the other hand, quantitative modeling indicates that some "ultraconserved" words exist that might be used to find evidence for deep linguistic relationships beyond that time barrier. Here we use a statistical model, which takes into account the frequency with which words are used in common everyday speech, to predict the existence of a set of such highly conserved words among seven language families of Eurasia postulated to form a linguistic superfamily that evolved from a common ancestor around 15,000 y ago. We derive a dated phylogenetic tree of this proposed superfamily with a time-depth of ∼14,450 y, implying that some frequently used words have been retained in related forms since the end of the last ice age. Words used more than once per 1,000 in everyday speech were 7-to 10-times more likely to show deep ancestry on this tree. Our results suggest a remarkable fidelity in the transmission of some words and give theoretical justification to the search for features of language that might be preserved across wide spans of time and geography. cultural evolution | phylogeny | historical linguistics T he English word brother and the French frère are related to the Sanskrit bhratr and the Latin frater, suggesting that words as mere sounds can remain associated with the same meaning for millennia. But how far back in time can traces of a word's genealogical history persist, and can we predict which words are likely to show deep ancestry?These questions are central to understanding language evolution and to efforts to identify linguistic superfamilies uniting the world's languages (1-5). Evidence for proposed superfamiliessuch as Amerind (6), linking most of the language families of the New World, and Nostratic (7-9) and Eurasiatic (3, 4, 10), linking the major language families of Eurasia-is often based on the identification of putative "cognate" words (analogous to homology in biology), the sound and meaning correspondences of which are thought to indicate that they derive from common ancestral words.

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“…The study of these processes suggested that language can be understood as an evolutionary system (Nowak et al, 2002) bearing strong similarities to mechanisms underlying the evolution of biological species (Pagel, 2009), which had been originally recognized by Charles Darwin (Darwin, 1871). The application of phylogenetic methods originally devised to characterize the evolution of biological organisms has yielded insight into the transformation of languages at the macro-scale of thousands of years (Gray and Atkinson, 2003), allowing to make inferences about language evolution reaching back to the the Upper-Palaeolithic period (Pagel et al, 2013). On shorter time scales, the analysis of grammatical and morphological changes has shed light on the dynamics of language over the course of half a millennium (Lieberman et al, 2007).…”

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