Cognates

Merriam Webster defines a “cognate” as
a : related by descent from the same ancestral language
b of a word or morpheme : related by derivation, borrowing, or descent
c of a substantive : related to a verb usually by derivation and serving as its object to reinforce the meaning

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Evolutionary dispersal of humans across the planet can be traced via the diversification of language. How do researchers know the approximate age of words? If they trace common words back to a point of common origin they can predict when the word first appeared in a human language. Common ancestry is used to designate language families. The individual words with common ancestry then are cognates.

Father (English), padre (Italian), pere (French), pater (Latin) and pitar (Sanskrit) are cognates. They share a common ancestry within the Indo-European, spoken by 46% of the world’s population, including  languages such as English, Spanish, Russian, and Hindi/Urdu. Other language families included Inuit-Yupik (Arctic languages); Chukchi-Kamchatkan (languages of far northeastern Siberia); Altaic (modern Turkish, Uzbek and Mongolian);  Dravidian (languages of south India); Kartvelian (Georgian) and Uralic (Finnish and Hungarian).

It makes sense a word as important as father would be highly conserved within a language family. Recent research probed which words were more likely to be conserved across several language families. They found 23 ultraconserved words that are cognates in four or more language families.

A Washington Post article reporting on the research spoke with the lead researcher, Mark Pagel of Reading University. “I was really delighted to see ‘to give’ there,” Pagel said. But the research team was surprised by the presence of “bark” as a conserved word.

“I have spoken to some anthropologists about that, and they say that bark played a very significant role in the lives of forest-dwelling hunter-gatherers,” Pagel said. Human technology involved using plants for everything from storage utensils, rope, fuel and medicine.

Among other ultra-conserved words they found “mother,” “not,” “what,” “to hear” and “man.” Those ideas in sound are expected because of their base importance in various cultures/peoples. However, why “to flow,” “ashes” and “worm”? What does it tell us about our unconscious awareness of human life?

Listen to some of the cognates here.

Upgraded Human Language Families (wikicolors) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)