We are family

Back in August last year, I wrote a blog entry about cognates (It's all relative, 25 August 2012), which referred to new research indicating that Indo-European languages (of which English is one) may be as much as 9000 years old. A friend alerted me to recent research, summarised in The Guardian, that had been undertaken by some of the same researchers. Their work, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of the United States of America (PNAS), takes the links between languages and language families much further. By applying a statistical model to examine the frequency of certain cognates in everyday speech across seven language families, the researchers assert that high-frequency cognates signify a superfamily of languages that may have existed across Europe and Asia as far back as 15,000 years ago.

Having never conducted any statistical linguistic research myself, the methods outlined simply indicate an attempt by the researchers to counter the usual criticisms or shortcomings of this kind of work in historical linguistics. Having said that, the researchers' results left me feeling that actually, the most prevalent, significant cognates – with controls to take account of chance sound associations – they discovered were actually rather predictable. The list of 23 significant cognates identified, in order of frequency, reads as follows: thou, I not, that, we, to give, who, this, what, man/male, ye, old, mother, to hear, hand, fire, to pull, black, to flow, bark, ashes, to spit, worm. Displaying these words in a table detailing variables such as their respective frequency, half-life (the expected time in 1000s of years before one word has a 50% chance of being replaced by a new cognate word) and the part of speech they exemplify is interesting.

In my view, this is because when they are presented together, knowing that seven language families have been considered; the words invite us to search for universals. From a semantic perspective, it doesn't surprise me that personal pronouns, interpersonal relationships and elements of the natural world are represented – since these words are, and have always been, by virtue of their function, essential to human interaction and/or survival for millennia. The researchers may, essentially, only be revealing by statistical methods what we have always believed to be true. If the pronoun we ain't broke, why fix it, for example? But our non-scientific gut feeling then leads us to consider to spit and worm as anomalies in the context of the table, when further historical or anthropological research may provide further insight.     

So for me, having never previously been interested in anything beyond cognates between modern English, German and French, this research will prove to be significant if its statistical model can be replicated and expanded in further studies. For if we are beginning to understand the rate of language change on a global scale from the distant past until the present; then the next step will surely be to apply the methodology to hopefully be better able to predict changes in languages and communication far into the future.