The 15,000-year-old ancestral language that birthed English and Russian
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Okay, maybe the word alone doesn't sound like much. But according to new research from Britain, "thou" may be one of the most enduring breadcrumbs of language in human evolutionary history.
In this study, a team of linguists from the University of Reading found clues that many modern languages — including but not limited to English, Russian, Portuguese, and more — descended
from a single ancestral tongue some 15,000 years ago. "Everybody in Eurasia can trace their linguistic ancestry back to a group, or groups, of people living around 15,000 years ago, probably
in southern Europe, as the ice sheets were retreating," Mark Pagel, an evolutionary biologist at Reading University, tells the Guardian.
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
In addition to Indo-European, the language families included Altaic (whose modern members include Turkish, Uzbek and Mongolian); Chukchi-Kamchatkan (languages of far northeastern Siberia);
Dravidian (languages of south India); Inuit-Yupik (Arctic languages); Kartvelian (Georgian and three related languages) and Uralic (Finnish, Hungarian and a few others). [Washington Post]
So how does our original pronoun, "thou," fit in? According to researchers, it's the only word to have a cognate in all seven language families.