very old words | 2016-02-03
in recent research, published here, four scienceticians compiled a list of words that have very old cognates shared across at least three of major language families in Eurasia (those being, Altaic,Chukchi-Kamchatkan, Eskimo-Aleut, Indo-European, and Uralic OR Altaic, Indo-European, Uralic, and Kartvelian, if you take the Nostratic macro-family structure).
basically, they were looking for words that are similar to the language families and, thus, might have been part of some proto-language that spawned all of those families.
here are the words that were shared by at least four of the families:
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
so… seems like sitting around the campfire with ye old mom and spitting on worms is a pretty old-school past-time… cool
so far on very old words
