4 very old words for very new things

Camera? Internet? Those words are 6,000 years old.

Camera
(Image credit: Thinkstcok/TongRo Images)

You may have heard about a new study examining "ultraconserved" words, which haven't changed much in form or sense for thousands and thousands of years. (Think about words like man, hand, mother, and spit.) There has also been some good criticism of the methodology of the study.

Many people seem to think it's a new discovery that many of the words we speak can be traced to a common language from thousands of years ago. But it's actually been known for a very long time that every language in the Indo-European family — from Portuguese to Norwegian to Croatian to Hindi — traces back to a single language, which we call Proto-Indo-European, or PIE for short. Then things started diverging into our modern languages about 5,700 years ago. The authors of the new study are simply trying to push even farther back into the past.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE
https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/flexiimages/jacafc5zvs1692883516.jpg

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up
To continue reading this article...
Continue reading this article and get limited website access each month.
Get unlimited website access, exclusive newsletters plus much more.
Cancel or pause at any time.
Already a subscriber to The Week?
Not sure which email you used for your subscription? Contact us
James Harbeck

James Harbeck is a professional word taster and sentence sommelier (an editor trained in linguistics). He is the author of the blog Sesquiotica and the book Songs of Love and Grammar.