corrections

[Tom Priestly]

Dear Rosina,


>Some time ago there was a report that some linguists had been successful
>in filtering down human language (educated sound) to the first 100 words
>used by our ancestors. Would you know which words they were and where more
>information in this respect may be found.

I have not heard of this report. Who are "our ancestors"? If they mean the
people who spoke Indo-European before it split up into so many different
languages - several millennia BC - then this is not not news: people have
been reconstructing this language for over 200 years (they began in the
1790s if not before), and becoming more and more precise with each decade.
They are probably very close by now to getting a good idea of this
language's sounds, its grammar, and its vocabulary - many more than 100
words. Until somebody invents a time machine, they will presumably never
reach perfection (it's rather like the old idea of a person walking towards
a wall and each hour halving the distance that they are away from that
wall: they never actually touch it, but after a day or so the amount by
which they come closer to the wall is imperceptible.) There are
dictionaries of reconstructed "Proto"-Indo-European in most university and
college libraries.

An aside:
Another idea which may be involved here is that of a "basic 100 words."
This was complied by an American linguist (just after World War Two, I
think) to go along with his theory that a basic word-stock has a specific
number of words replaced over a specific length of time. (Just as, for
instance, the Latin word for "head", caput, was replaced by another word
during the 2000 years that Latin changed into French: tête "head" comes
from a colloquial Latin slang word for "head", actually meaning something
mundane like "cooking pot", if my memory is right. Just as if "noggin" had
completely replaced "head" in English). Anyway, this guy proposed that,
following the above theory, if you have two related languages, and they
share a certain % of their "basic" words, then one can work out *more or
less exactly* how long it is since their common ancestors spoke a single
"proto"-language. - The fundamental idea is OK: more-closely-related
languages do share more words than less-closely-related ones. But a
*mathematical* formula? That idea has been discredited.

Back to the idea of the first para:
If by "our ancestors" they mean some earlier group of humans, then the
further back in time they refer to, the more improbable are their claims.
Linguists have tried to connect Indo-European with other language-families
(e.g., Hamito-Semitic) and they have been able to get a certain distance in
this endeavour (the I.-E. toH.-S. link is quite well worked out), but the
whole exercise gets very vague when you try to get into the upper tens of
thousands of years. Since humans have been around (unless one is a  strict
creationist) for much much longer than that, it sounds as if the report you
are referring to (again, depending on the definition of "ancestors") was
not made by trained linguists.

There are amateurs in all walks of life; there seem to be more amateur
linguists than e.g., amateur doctors (tho' where is the line between a
reliable untrained healer and a quack?!). After all, almost everyone speaks
a language, and lots of people firmly believe they know something about it.
In my own area of research there are brilliant amateur linguists and very
very misguided ones, and many more of the latter, alas. This may not be
typical, but I imagine that it is!

All the best
Tom

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*       Tom Priestly
*       9215-69 Street
*       Edmonton
*       Alberta, CANADA  T6B 1V8
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*       telephone:      780-469-2920
*       fax:            780-492-9106
*       e-mail:         tom.priestlyaualberta.ca
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