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 |    Not for the faint of art. |
| The way language evolves and changes over time is pretty cool. http://nautil.us/blog/the-english-word-that-hasnt-changed-in-sound-or-meaning-in... The English Word That Hasn’t Changed in Sound or Meaning in 8,000 Years So linguistics is something I'm interested in and I wish I knew more about it, which is why I read articles like this one -- which is more about what doesn't change, which is equally fascinating. One of my favorite words is lox,” says Gregory Guy, a professor of linguistics at New York University. There is hardly a more quintessential New York food than a lox bagel—a century-old popular appetizing store, Russ & Daughters, calls it “The Classic.” But Guy, who has lived in the city for the past 17 years, is passionate about lox for a different reason. “The pronunciation in the Proto-Indo-European was probably ‘lox,’ and that’s exactly how it is pronounced in modern English,” he says. “Then, it meant salmon, and now it specifically means ‘smoked salmon.’ It’s really cool that that word hasn’t changed its pronunciation at all in 8,000 years and still refers to a particular fish.” Well, now I'm all hungry. I haven't had a lox bagel in months. There's a place near me that makes a good one but... well, you know. So, I've known about Proto-Indo-European, or PIE, for some time. The idea is that a large number of languages originated from one source, a language that is so lost in the mists of time that we don't even know what it was called, or if it had a name at all. But I like pie almost as much as I like lox, so that will do. In modern English, well over half of all words are borrowed from other languages. I'd argue that all of our words are borrowed from other languages, but, well, I'm not a linguist. Analyzing the patterns of change that words undergo, moving from one language to another, showed how to unwind these changes and identify the possible originals. I can't help but notice the similarities to genetics, where biologists can trace common ancestry through genetic drift. The really obvious difference there is that horizontal gene transfer is rare in organisms with mitochondria in their cells, whereas horizontal meme transfer happens in language all the time. (I'm using "meme" in the original sense proposed by Dawkins.) The word lox was one of the clues that eventually led linguists to discover who the Proto-Indo-Europeans were, and where they lived. This is where it starts to get really cool, because it's never been clear, at least to me, where the people who spoke PIE lived, or how their language, in the form of its descendants, came to dominate half the world. In reconstructed Indo-European, there were words for bear, honey, oak tree, and snow, and, which is also important, no words for palm tree, elephant, lion, or zebra. Based on evidence like that, linguists reconstructed what their homeland was. The only possible geographic location turned out to be in a narrow band between Eastern Europe and the Black Sea where animals, trees, and insects matched the ancient Indo-European words. No reason to name something that you don't have in your area. But that alone is a hypothesis that requires further investigation. So they did further investigation. In the 1950s, archaeological discoveries backed up this theory with remnants of an ancient culture that existed in that region from 6,000 to 8,000 years ago. Those people used to build kurgans, burial mountains, that archaeologists excavated to study cultural remains. In that process, scholars not only learned more about the Proto-Indo-Europeans but also why they were able to migrate across Europe and Asia. And to summarize the rest of it: horses and the wheel made this culture extremely mobile, so they were able to spread themselves, or at least their language, far and wide. Which still doesn't explain why you have some very different words for things in languages, like "cheval" in French and "horse" in English. But I suppose they have theories for that, too. And yet the word for "cat" is so similar across so many different languages that I have to wonder if they brought their feline companions with them as they traveled and/or conquered. Which would also be pretty cool. After all, someone has to eat all the leftover salmon. |
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