A team of researchers at the University of Reading’s School of Biological Sciences have compiled a list of 23 of the oldest words known so far, all common to seven “proto-Eurasiatic” ancient languages. These languages branched out into hundreds of languages, some still spoken today — including English, French, Russian, Hindi, and Farsi — others long extinct, such as Latin, Hittite, Sanskrit, and Gothic.
The researchers estimate these words are 15,000 years old. They
These words are:
- 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.
Were you to find yourself beside a campfire 150 centuries ago alongside a group of hunter-gatherers, chances have it that they might understand some of these words. Some are pretty obvious, like “mother”, “not”, “what” or the ever so life-saving “fire”, but “worm” and “spit” definitely come as a surprise.
There’s a consensus among linguists that a language typically can’t survive past 8,000 or 9,000 years, since it’s common for languages to mix and get replaced by other more influential languages or morph into new ones altogether. These timeless “ultra-conservative” words show that this isn’t entirely true, albeit the list of words is only a handful large.
The 2013 research was led by Mark Pagel of the University of Reading’s School of Biological Sciences. Pagel and his team first started with 200 words that linguists know to be the core vocabulary of all languages. What interested them were “cognates,” words that have the same meaning and a similar sound in different languages. For instance, father (English), padre (Italian), pere (French), pater (Latin), and pitar (Sanskrit) are cognates.
The researchers focused on seven language families spanning Eurasia, hypothesized to share a common ancestor from around 15,000 years ago. By examining frequently used words in everyday speech, they identified those likely to have deep ancestral roots. Their approach involved reconstructing proto-words (the ancestral forms of words) for basic meanings across these language families, creating a dataset from the Languages of the World Etymological Database. After the roots of these words were found, the scientists came up with this list of 23 words.
- “I” and “thou” – Personal pronouns like “I” and “thou” (you) are fundamental in communication, appearing in multiple language families.
- “Not” – A negation word like “not” has remained consistent across languages, highlighting its essential role in human expression.
- “That” – Demonstrative pronouns such as “that” are crucial in language for specifying and distinguishing objects.
- “We” – The pronoun “we” is vital for indicating collective identity and has shown remarkable stability.
- “To give” – Verbs like “to give” are integral to interactions and transactions, reflecting their deep-seated role in societies.
- “Who” – Interrogative pronouns such as “who” are fundamental for inquiry and have been preserved across various languages.
- “This” and “what” – These words are frequently used in conversation, making them less likely to change over time.
- “Man” and “mother” – Nouns denoting fundamental human relationships and characteristics show a deep linguistic lineage.
- “Fire” and “hand” – Basic elements of human life and survival, these words have remained largely unchanged.
“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,” Pagel and his team wrote.
What’s rather interesting to note is the meaning of these words. These words survived for 15,000 years, despite technology, society, religion, and so forth changed dramatically. Their value has remained undisturbed from the time of the last Ice Age.
“I was really delighted to see ‘to give’ there,” Pagel said. “Human society is characterized by a degree of cooperation and reciprocity that you simply don’t see in any other animal. Verbs tend to change fairly quickly, but that one hasn’t.”
Previously, Pagel’s team also revealed the oldest words in English. They discovered that the words ‘I’, ‘we’, ‘who’ and the numbers ‘1’, ‘2’, and ‘3’ are amongst the oldest words, not only in English, but across all Indo-European languages.
If you’d like to hear how some of these words sounded thousands of years ago, check out the Washington Post, where they have several words like “mother”, “thou” and … “spit” spelled into some of the world’s oldest languages.
