15,000-year-old words that are unchanged.
Linguists in England have identified a list of 23 words from seven major language families that have shared sounds and meaning, known as cognates, and further suggest these words date back to an ancient common language.
Using knowledge of how the pronunciation of words have changed over time before there was a written form of the language, University of Reading linguists have nailed down some words that are thought to have come from a common origin.
Their discoveries might be a missing link between nearly 700 different contemporary languages that are spoken in the world today.
This excludes quite a few languages like Chinese, Tibetan, and many African languages, along with indigenous and aboriginal languages of Australia and the Americas.
But the findings show that several words have remained virtually the same for 15 thousand years.
A handful of common words that originate from the so called “proto-Eurasiatic” language are: we, who, give, mother, man, not, and to hear.
Some linguists argue that it is impossible for a word to retain the same meaning and sound for more than 10 thousand years.
