THE Washington Post reports today that linguists have discovered a handful of “ultraconserved” words, some 15,000 years old. These are said to include “hand”, “give”, “bark” and “ash”. The paper is “Ultraconserved words point to deep language ancestry across Eurasia,” by Mark Pagela, Quentin D. Atkinson, Andreea S. Calude, and Andrew Meade in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The Post buried the real news, though: what the new paper does is claim this as evidence that 7 modern language families, not yet conclusively shown to be related, are part of an Ur-family called proto-Eurasiatic. By their theory, the Indo-European, Uralic, Altaic, Inuit-Yupik, Dravidian, Chukchi-Kamchatkan and Kartvelian languages all share a common ancestor. The descendants of these proto-languages are spoken in a vast territory covering most of Eurasia including the Indian subcontinent today.

What the Post doesn’t even brush on is how controversial this is likely to be. Historical linguists have not just established the existence of proto-families. They have elaborately reconstructed them.  By…Continue reading

via Johnson http://www.economist.com/node/21577307?fsrc=rss