Hacker News Reader

Comment by jbattle | Hacker News Reader

I don't get this. I know this is a monstrously crude approach, but I put the sentence given in the article to Google translate

"You, hear me! Give this fire to that old man. Pull the black worm off the bark and give it to the mother. And no spitting in the ashes!"

After translating it into a few different languages, almost none of the words sound anywhere close to their English counterparts. French and Danish had a fair bit of similarities but that's to be expected. Am I fundamentally misunderstanding something here?

For reference I tried estonian, albanian, czech, finnish, and georgian

View on HN

>Am I fundamentally misunderstanding something here?

Perhaps.

For one, Google translate is not very accurate, even for simple stuff.

Second, the translations it picks might no be the form that has survived from the old times. Newer words might have put the use of the older form in disfavour, but it can still exist in the language. If something was the same in a language from 15,000 years ago up to 500 years ago, it won't be picked up in Google Translate, which will pick the current vernacular.

Third, they probably give an exact table of the equivalencies they found in the actual paper. It would be easier to check that if they have it available for free.

Four, they speak about how words sound, not how the look. So you have to take pronunciation of each language into account, which often can be quite different from what is written.

Yes, saying that "thou" is a word that has survived for hundreds of centuries is a bit odd to me. As far as I can tell, the only reason thou even exists as a word in modern English (at least in the US) is because it's so heavily used in the Bible (not exactly a modern book). The only times I hear someone using thou is in context of the Bible or ye olde tyme joking.

Bible wasn't originally written in English of course. The more recent the translation, the less Thou you get. We didn't have much alternative for 2nd person singular pronouns until "You" wiped "Thou" off the map somewhat recently and attempts at turning "Thou" into a formal religious version of "You" seem to have flopped. Then again we did pretty well without a second person plural until y'all invented y'all, plus or minus some "ye" anyway.

Theres some idioms that'll never die even if no one understands the history. "Holier than thou". Much like "Your name is Mudd" sometimes kinda horrifies people who don't know the story of Abe Lincoln and Dr Mudd. I've met people who claim to not know the history of "cotton pickin hands" or even acknowledge its racial background, which seems hard to believe, then again cotton hasn't been hand harvested in a couple generations locally so its possible the kids were telling the truth about not knowing what they're saying...

Well, "thou" also had a use for a period of time as an intimate form of "you." The intention behind the use of "Thou" to address God in the Bible is not to place distance between the speaker and God; on the contrary, it is to indicate closeness and intimacy.

The Wikipedia article on thou explains this briefly in the introductory paragraphs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thou

Looking up "cotton pickin" in Google ngram viewer, it appears to be mostly a product of the 1960s-1970s ruralsploitation fad: The Beverly Hillbillies, Hee Haw and Foghorn Leghorn.

It's probably just an intentionally quaint pseudo-folk saying invented by someone in Burbank.

I don't think the Google ngram viewer is an appropriate tool for something that mostly belongs to the spoken language, and even more that of pour illiterate blacks and southerners.

"It's probably just an intentionally quaint pseudo-folk saying invented by someone in Burbank."

LOL no, assuming you young folks pretending not to understand are serious. As a hint take a look at the skin color and local social hierarchy position of the people picking cotton back when that was still done by hand, by property or former property, as they used to say. It was basically used in place of the "N-word" when it was just barely not socially acceptable to use the "N-word" in that situation.

Shakespeare, among others.

>Yes, saying that "thou" is a word that has survived for hundreds of centuries is a bit odd to me.

Well, for linguists "thou" and "you" is the same word.

Not just in that they mean the same, but in the same sense that in evolution X1 is said to be an ancestor species to X2.

"Thou" and "You", is the same word passed through a process of changes in pronunciation and spelling during the years. Linguists keep track of those kinds of things.

"Thou" is recently deceased, and while it hasn't been thoroughly documented, it's as likely as not due to a combination of the over-extension of the polite form of address and the use in early English typography of the "y" from Latinate typefaces for the thorn character. ("Ye" of "ye olde" is an alternate spelling of "the", and not related to the second person plural subject pronoun "ye".)

The polite plural is common enough in European languages; there are French dialects (in Canada, at least) where a good rule of thumb is "don't use tu unless you're sleeping with that person or are their parent". With the second person singular restricted to intimate use, it's not hard to imagine it falling away.

I believe you are confusing the spoken sound of a particular cognate with the semantic meanings of the word that have remained consistent across different languages.

For example, "fire" has a very direct translation in a large number of languages. Historically, it was believed that the evolution of word-use would preclude such semantic stability, but the words these researchers identified are perhaps suggestive of a common proto-Eurasiatic language. The fact that less used words like "flow" and "worm" remained consistent legitimizes this theory.

If you take this tree [1] as canon, English and Czech are fifth cousins, once-removed. If you compared me to my fifth cousin, I probably would look nothing like him, but I might carry similar traits or certainly similar ancestry.

Although the article doesn't convey it very well (and I am skeptical of the finding itself anyway), I believe what they are trying to say is that these words all 'have not changed' in that they all have derived from the same eventual ancestor. That is, the word's pronunciation may have morphed, but the words were never abandoned in favor of new ones. An example here would be the English 'four' vs. the Spanish 'cuatro'. If you believe in the reconstruction of the proto-language Proto-Indo-European (and Wiktionary [2]) then these both derive from the word * kʷetwóres[3].

The Spanish one is a bit easier to understand.

   * kʷetwóres (PIE) -> quattuor (Latin) -> cuatro (Spanish)

Nothing too shocking there, I hope. Latin dropped the "es" off of the end and changed the first vowel a bit, then Spanish simplified the "uo" diphthong into "o" (perhaps through Vulgar Latin? [4]), and reversed or->ro, and of course changed spelling because it's a different language.

English, however, took a little bit odder of a path. Somewhere before Proto-Germanic, * kʷetwóres->* petwṓr, which was an irregular change (perhaps to mimic five, which was * pénkʷe->* pémpe [5][6]). Then, a very regular rule, called Grimm's Law [7], kicked in in the first millennium BC, which shifted p sounds toward ɸ sounds ("For English-speakers, it is easiest to think of the sound as an f-sound made only with the lips, instead of the upper teeth and lower lip."[8]). So * petwṓr->* fedwōr (Note the t got vocalized into a d as well) in Proto-Germanic. West Germanic then lost the hard d in the middle, to make * fewōr, which became Old English fēower, into Middle English fower, into Modern English four. So:

    * kʷetwóres->* petwṓr->* fedwōr->* fewōr->fēower->fower->four

Both of these are sets of incremental changes from a common ancestor. Individually, the small changes make some sense (I hope), but once you get several thousand years away from the root, words like "cuatro" and "four" seem like they are completely unrelated by sound, even though they're very related by ancestry.

I'm no historical linguist, but hopefully that helps explain why these things sound nothing alike. :)

[1]http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4f/IndoEurop...

[2]http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Proto-Indo-European/k...

[3] The * indicates that the word is a reconstruction, not actually something attested to in found writings.

[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vulgar_Latin#Monophthongization

[5] http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Proto-Germanic/fedw%C...

[6] http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Proto-Germanic/fimf

[7] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grimm%27s_law (Yes, one of the Brothers Grimm!)

[8] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_bilabial_fricative

Thanks - that was a good read!

But what about cuatro & four qualifies these as "ultraconserved"? Do these stand in contradiction to other words that arose without some gradual evolution?

If a word that evolves in a multitude of branches to arrive in a multitude of various forms is ultraconserved, what is a word that is just kinda conserved, or not conserved at all?

I personally chose 'four' to write about on a whim, because 'cuatro' sounded different enough, but was relatively explainable in a paragraph. But this only goes back to languages in the Indo-European tree.

The paper addressed here says that these 'ultraconserved' words share an ancestor before Indo-European. Via page two:

    In addition to Indo-European, the language families included Altaic (whose modern members include Turkish, Uzbek and Mongolian); Chukchi-Kamchatkan (languages of far northeastern Siberia); Dravidian (languages of south India); Inuit-Yupik (Arctic languages); Kartvelian (Georgian and three related languages) and Uralic (Finnish, Hungarian and a few others).

So, if you can imagine doing that process we did, but backwards, trying to take all these hundreds of languages, living and extinct, in the Indo-European family [1] and making one giant proto language that they all descended from, with a bunch of rules that determine how they morphed to become the child languages, then you get Proto-Indo-European. Now do that again for the other language families above. Then compare the resultant hypothetical languages, and see if they share enough between them to say that they are all children of the same language. This is a lot more controversial, see [2] (what this paper seems to subscribe to) and [3].

What the hypothesis seems to be here (this is speculatory; I haven't read the paper) is "If we look at these proto languages, there seem to be words that are similar enough that they probably are the last remnants of some ultra-proto language that all of these language families descended from".

And all words are coined and undergo evolution at some point, but often the popularity of words for the same thing can change, and not all words come from antiquity.

Inventions like 'piano' and 'internet' obviously haven't been around very long in the grand scheme of things. But we have other words like 'cater' and 'embrace' that are attributed to Shakespeare [4]. Some words that haven't been conserved: leafworm for caterpillar, wig for war [5], clepe for 'to call', except in the nearly-dead yclept [6], which also contains the ge/y prefix that makes past participles [7].

If you check out [8], you'll spot a bunch of words you probably know, but with senses they don't have anymore.

So words are always coming and going, and it seems that this paper is trying to say that certain prevalent words today statistically seem to be from a time before PIE. This reeks a bit of glottochronology [9] to me, though, which is fairly controversial.

[1] http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4f/IndoEurop...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurasiatic_languages

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-World

[4] http://www.pathguy.com/shakeswo.htm

[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Changes_to_Old_English_vocabula...

[6] http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/yclept

[7] http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/y-

[8] http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:English_archaic_terms

[9] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glottochronology

Try setting it up, walking away for 5 minutes or so (clearing your mind of the original English), and then comparing the translations that aren't English.

The idea is that the fact that we understand English gives it a different quality, and you want to subtract that from your analysis.

Don't know if it'll help, but it might.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com