Words That Last

Previous submission of main article, which has been on the front page of HN for several hours:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5669179

By the way, I agree with the several comments there that the hypothesis mentioned in the article is far from generally accepted by linguists. (That's probably why the underlying scientific study was published in PNAS rather than in Language or Science, where I'd expect a truly path-breaking paper in linguistics to be published.)

"Father (English), padre (Italian), pere (French), pater (Latin) and pitar (Sanskrit) are cognates" - From related article http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/lingui...