Words, stories, worship, caste system, technology, astrology. Tons. I've got some theories I'd actually love to get your views on. Do you have an email I could send some observations and questions?
Did you come across the ancestry of the infantile words for ‘mother’ and ‘father.’ In most cultures worldwide they are variations of ‘papa/vata/dada’ and ‘mama/mumu/moma’ and similar sounds. This is true across language with very different usual structures for words. I’ve always understood this to be because these simple consonant/vowel combinations are just the noises babies make when they close their mouths when making a sound. They make these noises a lot so parents believe it is in reference to them and then reinforce the use of the noise. As such, I’d strongly suspect that they are the oldest consistent words in nearly all human languages.
i think most linguists ascribe that to the fact that mama is one of the first sounds babies are able make, and considering the importance of infants and mothers cultures adopt this sound or sounds similar as the word for mother
@@barnsleyman32 Yes this just really comes down to the fact that "m" and "b/p" are the easiest consonant sounds to produce (with b/p being a bit hard than m), since you just need to touch your lips together and don't need to use the tongue. So, yes, these are almost definitely the most ancient words, but that's not all that interesting to talk about from a linguistics perspective since mama and baba/papa are just the simplest vowel+consonant combinations we can produce with our mouths.
This is very cool. Our world is so vast and ancient, and human history is still so much of a mystery to us. Knowing that we STILL use words that go all the way back to the beginning of civilization makes me feel truly connected to that mystery.
I heard something super interesting and mysterious about German language. German lagnauge is really different from other Indo European langauges (Russian, Spanish, Latin, Iranian) . In that , as One linguistic mentioned to me, that some of the oldest Germanic words that are not found indo european , all made up of nouns that describe WAR tech like Thunder, Fire, Charriot, Axe . Essentially Germanic langauges in its infancy was all about War and Technology , which is why they excel at these two topics so much like no other linguistic cultural group. Nahuatl has a lot of words with Genetic engineering Crops, it even translated into the Castaz with people. Latin has a lot of words for Order and Law. English has a lot of words with Diplomacy and trade as its focal points. But one thing is true, that German langauge was altered, the older german langauges were very different from modern german. Modern German sort of got latanized like English .. But we know that older English was different from modern English (RP ENGLISH). But we see something similar happening w/ Chinese Mandarin in China replacing all local dialects.
Look up Irving Finkel on ytube. He's an Assyriologist who translates cuneiform tablets. He claims that aside from the invention of the electric guitar humans haven't truly advanced from the time of Babylon.
@@chibiromano5631 this could go one of two ways, when I studied linguistics we were taught that language evolves and assimilates through necessity, so if your culture is very much war based.. you will evolve or come up with words to desribe those ideas and concepts. If your culture deals with a lot of law and order, then you come up again with words to describe these new concepts and ideas (eg. as the romans figured out new ways of governance). So it's more the culture that builds the language and then the language reenforces the culture.
Absolutely fascinating. I live in Alaska and have been studying the Indo Europeans and Ancient North Eurasian cultures after I noted a number of similarities between the cultures of my pre-Christian ancestors and those of the natives of my homeland. The more I learn about this great story of cultures and migration, the more I find how related the North Eurasians and Americans are
I have a Proto-Indo-European to Tsimshian language lexicon that shows that indeed, there are structural and word cognates in (specifically) Canadian indians on the West Coast. There are also comparisons to be made in mythology etc, and all through North and South America are the stories of the divine TWINS.
In another video, Crecganford talked about the Hero Twins. I happen to be studying the ancient Mayans. Their ancient religion also has the Hero Twins, as described in their sacred scripture, the 'Popol Vuh.' This puts the Hero Twins in Mesoamerica by at least 2000 BCE. But the Mayan traditions were derived from older traditions, Olmec for example, which may be much older. Also interesting, Crecganford discussed how the Hero Twins were connected to the horse & dog. But the horse did not exist in ancient Mesoamerica, but the Hero Twins did! Are the Hero Twins perhaps older than the domestication of the horse? Or was the horse forgotten in a land where horses did not exist? Surely the horse would have been remembered as a mythic creature!
Also, I keep thinking about the Biblical story of Cain & Able, which may be a variation of the Hero Twins. But there's no horse there either. But there is a concept of a clash between hunter gatherers versus agriculturalists or maybe shepherds/herders versus agriculturalists. The Old Testament Biblical era goes back to maybe 1800 BCE. But it's clear the myths & stories in Genesis go back to a much earlier time. (Noah & the Great Flood goes back to the ancient Sumerians & Gilgamesh to at least 3000 BCE, e.g. 5000 years ago. I personally think the myths of the Great Flood go back to the melting of the great glaciers, at the end of the last Ice Age perhaps 10,,000 or 12,000 years ago.)
Gilgamesh & Enkidu may also be a variation of the Hero Twins AND before the horse! Gilgamesh is the demigod & civilized man while Enkidu is a wild man of the earth! (Perhaps even a proto-human of some sort!)
In romanian language we have the word 'DRACUL' as 'the devil' and it's mostly represented as a serpent or as a dragon, the St George type of dragon. We also have the word 'dragon'. Now, from an etymological perspective 'dracu' is latin and 'dragon' is greek and that's quite normal because romanians are orthodox latins, but 'dracu' is referring to the 'unholy' with a more religious connotation, while dragon is more like a fairy tale zoological beeing. Anyway, this two words have different meaning, one is latin and one greek, but they both came from the same word 'draco/drako' as a out of this world devilish serpent who is to be feared by humans... ✌️❤️🫶
Seriously... this channel has become one of my favorites. I love to hear this wonderful stories, every night, while I sit at my desk and do my crafting... Thank you , Crecganford, for all this knowledge and awesome narrations. Thank you very much! P.S.: Also, this channel has rekindled my love for tea, not gonna lie...
I've always had this idea that the origin of dragons came from the the constellation Draco, which was first known as only a serpent. Draco has a yearly meteor shower that is centered in it from the earth passing through a comet debris tail. I believe this yearly event is where the idea of the "serpent spitting fire" comes from. Humans may have already known the constellation before the comet was captured in its current orbit just like the Taurids which are from a comet that entered the solar system around 20,000 years ago. There is also an idea out there that dragons are one cultures way of describing meteorite entering the atmosphere. Chinese tales of dragons especially seem to be of this variety.
I will be talking about dragons in some upcoming videos, and looking at the earliest myths we can find. And large physical snakes were part of the first stories I can trace, but it doesn’t mean stories weren’t then enhanced, or influenced, by major geological events. In fact we know they were as serpents became “water” focused.
In my opinion, first words used by humans in the very first language had to be all (or at least most of them) onomatopoeic, and I think you can find a clue of that even today. In my language (Serbian) if you try to divide a word into smallest bits and find its root word, usually it makes sense, but sometimes, like with the toponyms for rivers, hills and other geographic features that tend to survive unchanged for centuries or even millennia, they don't always make sense, which imply they're quite old in such form. And one of the oldest words in my language have to be words for trees, because most of them don't make any sense in my modern language if you try and "translate" them or even their root words. And there are also such old words which are pretty similar in my language and other Indo-European languages, like German or English or even Hindu, which of course implies they have common origin and are quite old since they fairly changed. One of those words is "birch". Now, you can speculate the meaning behind that name, both in English and Serbian (for instance, it says the first recorded use of that word in English is before 12th century, already as a name for the tree, and you can only speculate if it's, say, related to the word "birth" - or we could speculate that in my language the word "breza" - how we call birch, is linked to the word "breg" meaning small hill etc.), but all those speculations don't make very sense, other than they look nice to compare them to modern words. Neither birch was linked to the cult of birth, nor it grows only on hills. However, if you want to find out the true meaning of the word or its possible point of origin, you have to divide it until you reach the root word, or sometimes even syllable, which served as kernel for growth. And when you realize the root word or syllable for the word birch is almost the same in my language and in English, even if it's only letters "b" and "r", it implies two things - common origin (obviously) and very old age. And I don't know about over there, but here the expression "brrrr" is still used onomatopoeic for freezing, like in "it's freezing" or "I'm freezing". Just that "brrr" is enough to tell it all. And how does a birch tree look like? Like it's covered in snow. So my hypothesis is birch meant "cold tree" in the very first sense of meaning. Makes you think. That might not be the right explanation, but it certainly satisfies me more than to try and find "modern" explanations, because it connects two distinct languages in far away point in time. And I'm absolutely sure that most of the first original language had to be mostly onomatopeia of things naturally surrounding them. Sorry for the long text, but I enjoyed finally sharing that somewhere where it's adequate. :)
Hmm. I can totally see that. It also fits in with a lot of languages' words for animals. Mao, Gou, Chi, Nu. Cat, Dog, Chicken, Cow/Ox in Mandarin Chinese.
"Bast" the name of the Egyptian cat goddess might have an onomatopoeic origin. Even today a lot of languages use the onomatopoeic sounds "bsst" or "psst" to call cats.
Interestingly, I just heard (somewhere) that the bubonic plague also has its roots in the area of modern day Kazakhstan beginning around 15,000 years ago. It might be interesting to track words having the meaning, "disease" or "pestilence."
I've always been fascinated by words and how they evolve. I've always wondered just how many words in our language were around thousands of years ago. On the note of the common dragon myth, I like the idea that post-ice age, the glaciers receded, so a lot of rock was exposed which means a lot of dinosaur fossils would have been exposed. It's not much of a leap to say that post-ice age would have been when the dragon myths started popping up and it could very well have affected language and the words we used for them.
Related and also a possible reason, is that due to land rising out of the sea after the weight of the huge glaciers disappeared, a significant amount of whale skeletons would have ended up on land (skeletons, not fossils). This is because the cold and brackish water near the glaciers were inhospitable to bone eating sea worms that otherwise destroy whale skeletons on the sea floor, preventing accumulation. However, near glaciers, there would have been the right circumstances to both feed whales and preserve their skeletons. Whale skeletons, particularly those of toothed whales do look like huge snakes, with the flippers looking like wings. This might also explain myths of giant winged serpents in the Americas.
My favourite Indo-European word is 'wine' which is found in a similar form in every single branch of the language family. Similar words are also found in Caucasian and Semitic languages, indicating the closeness of all three language families after the discovery of wine and its adoption among their speakers.
This could, be explained by wine being invented in one culture then traded with other cultures. As they imported the commodity they would also import the name for it. Just as we imported words like Tomato and pepper from the regions where those items were found. The reason we have the same word for Tomato as the Aztecs isn't due to a common ancestry. We literally took their name for it. In fact, the more recent a word was invented, the more likely it has kept it's original form across different cultures. Consider the word "Football". A pretty recent invention (in the grand scheme of things). In practically every country where it's played it has the same name, even though the separate words for "Foot" and "Ball" would vary wildly across those languages. So I'd argue that the commonality of the word "wine" indicates that it was invented AFTER the language families diverged. If it had been a common part of the language before they diverged, the word itself would have also diverged and, by now, every language would have their own unique word for it.
Yet another fascinating (and all-too-brief) video from my new favourite channel! I’ve downloaded the linked PDF and will read it later. My initial reaction is a hope that the quantitative modelling gives more convincing results than Greenberg’s earlier “Nostratic” suggestion (now discredited, I believe). Anyway, keep these thought-provoking videos coming!
In ancient greek there are some non indoeuropean common words, such as θάλασσα (sea), άψινθος (a plant), τερέβινθος (another plant), ασάμινθος (bath tube) and many name places (like Αττική, attica, Παρνασσός, parnasus, Υμηττός, Hemetus, Κόρινθος, Corinth) that were used by the pelasgic populations of the area, long before thw known greek tribes arrive here. The language family that these words belong is osbcure. The interesting fact is that are still used (allmost all of them) in our modern greek language... It was a surprise for me when I learned that were non indoeuropean
I think there’s a similar phenomenon in Italian which has some old Etruscan words still in use. Obviously toponyms like “Tuscany” and more, but even some non-place names…I don’t actually speak Italian so I’m not entirely sure. I would guess the non-PIE words still in use in Greek are from an older stratum, perhaps Minoan or an “old European” language used by the Danube (Vinca) culture, or its equivalent in Greece before the arrival of PIE speakers. You’re right, it would be fascinating to know exactly where they came from!
Meh. This would have been FAR more interesting if they had taken this list of words and shown their forms in Proto-Indo-European, Proto-Altaic, Proto-Uralic, and so on, then pointed out why they believe the words to be related. Maybe I overlooked it, but I didn't see any of this. Just hypothesizing and pulling this stuff out of their asses.
It is just arsewipe. Here ya go some shite with no backing. Sure all of these language families are attested, but there's a whole Branch missing, the Sino languages, the African Languages and more. And these languages mentioned are the most likely to have come in contact with each other, but that does not mean they have a common ancestral language at all. And this does not take into fact the actual population migration patterns of humankind at all. And the eventuality of spoken language as we know it, being invented in multiple places over time. Which is technically the most likely.
I agree completley. There is a point at which discussing an 'ancestor' language becomes speculative to the extreme. A list of English words without comparison to anything else doesn't really tell us anything except those words have old origins, which is pretty much the case for all words.
Hey man, I just discovered this video and I absolutely love it! I'm studying linguistics here in the States with a minor in history so I couldn't have asked for a more interesting and informative video! I don't know if you'll see this comment since the video is a year old but on the off chance you do I just wanted to say that I really enjoyed this and that you've got a new subscriber! Keep it up dude!
My understanding is that Proto-Indo European was never an actual language but rather a lexicon of reverse engineered words that may have been derived from one or more ancestral languages. In the same way that we could create a hypothetical genome of a common ancestor to any two species without claiming an actual organism existed with that genome. More of a hypothetical evolutionary tree than a proposed language that some specific population actually spoke. Has that thinking changed?
No that is correct. The ACTUAL Human language that would have been spoke my Proto Indian Europeans is unverfiable as we don't have any of it written down... and no recorded interviews from the times ;) So it is indeed a lexicon of reverse engineered words. Very interesting though to think about and certainly what linguists have reverse engineered would be CLOSE to much of day to day vocabulary of such people but with many slight errors...
Great Flood myths are also pervasive in early religions, including ones in the Americas. Possibly from stories of rapid rising seas and collapsing glaciers at the end of the last ice age.
Agreed. It’s such a common thread globally that it has to be talking about some event that happened. While I’m not saying I believe this but I sometimes wonder if there were any civilizations that got drowned in this.
@@Crecganford well the team that found the Titanic, found a preserved Ice age town at the bottom of the Black sea, in a Oxygen free area and recovered wood and worked stone form the town, The National Geographic Magazine has photos form the sight.
Extremely informative! It would be awesome to know these creation myths existed prior to the melting of the Ice age (15,000 years old! Great video bro!
I am working on finding out... but I now have a solid link from the Ice Age to Genesis! A video will be out in the next 4 weeks or so. Thanks for your support and I'll catch up with you guys soon :)
Before the ice age there seemed to be fertility symbols that were worshipped in the form of a woman or genitals and such. Which means that there likely was a belief of an earth mother. Perhaps people were buried deep within caves to be as close as possible to this earth mother. From other finds we see evidence of shamanism and ancestor/spirit belief. It also heavily depends on the region. The aboriginals have completely different stories for example. And they left Africa atleast 30,000 years ago. Yet there is no way to know if these stories are still resembling the same stories from 30,000 years ago.
@@mver191 Yes, I'm quite familiar with these "Earth Mother" figures, and the Lion Man one. I have museum replicas of them in my study. I'm also aware of the dragon being a big part of pre-Younger Dryas culture in Eurasia and so probably the American continent too. Aborigines left Africa about 10,000 years before the homo-sapien population who populate Europe, and they were very isolated. We do have some of their old stories, but they are mainly around how the landscape changed due to the sea levels rising post-YD.
@@MythVisionPodcast good to see you here my friend. Love what both of you are doing. Stories are a beautiful way of creating culture it's sad to see how we are using them to separate ourselves from others instead of celebrating them to draw us together.
I choose papers that have been peer reviewed and published in respected journals to help give credibility to what I present. It is also why I don't tell to many stories based on the field. But I'm please you enjoyed it, and thank you for taking the time to comment and feedback, it is all appreciated.
Brilliant research and absolutely fascinating topic. Thanks for your curiosity that led you to wonder, your diligence in researching the topic, and your quality content presentation!
Extremely interesting. Thank you very much. I have, myself, often toyed with the notion that the old principle of 'ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny' might shed light on language development, too. In the first year of life, which the human baby spends mostly on its back, babbling and gurgling, , the first clear consonant sounds produced are the bilabials (|m|, |b| & |p|, almost 'accidentally', since they are the easier for undeveloped oral vocal apparatus to produce for the baby. Uttering these within the easiest first vowel context for the baby to produce, namely |a|, the baby often utters "mama", "papa", "baba", gurgle, and these are taken as meaningful by many cultures as the baby's first word. (Mama, moeder, mere, mamon, papa, pere, pater etc in Western languages, for example.) From these early utterances,baby goes on to develop those oral muscle skills required to utter the range of sounds it hears in the language environment around it. My amateur speculations would need to investigate early babbling and first words in the range of languages, of course, including Asian and the many existing indigenous languages that have survived, because if it's not universal then it doesn't apply.
This hypothesis has always fascinated me. I have had in my possession an Indo-European Dictionary, with the stem words, as I recall. So things that would have been common on the steppes of Eurasia may have traveled with the peoples who originally lived there. The word that I remember was the root, or perhaps the stem word for "apple." And there were so many others, of course. You are saying that Indo-European may have been about half-way from the language/s spoken in earlier days. So nice to hear of this again! Subbed.
When I was in grammar school a teacher in the 5th grade once said that the oldest words were those of predators, lions, tigers and (oh my) bears plus food sources. She thought the oldest word was "tiger." I never forgot the lesson but have no clue of its truth.
I think the first words were onomatopoeic and probably related to sounds of enemies and predators, that would make sense. Although I too have no idea to prove it. Thank you for sharing that.
I'm a Bartender and talked to a guy from Bangladesh (the Land that split itself off from India) I learned, how to "ask for your name" in Bangla: tu mar nam ki? Tu (you "Du" in German) mar(have) Nam (name) Ki (which "Qui" or. "Que" in french, Spanish or italian) With "mar" being the only word, that is not related to an European tongue as far as I know. I thought this to be extremely fascinating. - if asked, I would understand the little brown guy and would straight away answer: Patrick, mar nam: Patrick.
I expected the first word in common across languages would be “ma”, or some “m” syllable for calling one’s mother. Or a “b” syllable because that is one of the first sounds a baby makes.
Ma doesnt actually mean mother it means giver, therefore mother or mama is giver giver, someone who keeps giving.... Mael as in melchizedek the mael is a prefix, meaning giver to god El which is a title for the person who was born to be high priest.
@@douglasfell4199 Interesting. But how do you know which meaning came first? Not that it actually matters, but it seems to me that once “ma” is associated with one’s mother, or “she who provides sustenance and nurturance”, that meaning could then be generalized to non-mother givers, like “Father” was generalized from “dad” to “Father in Heaven”, or God. Babies learn from what is at hand. ‘Giver” seems too abstract to have been the original meaning. Not that I am any expert…or arguing… these are just questions I would ask a professor…
@@margaretford1011 ill look out sources that say mama means giver giver. You of course are correct that fathers are also givers, however historically they are seen as gatherers / providers to the household and mothers are givers within the household. Sorry for the equality issue with this, but it would be historic. There is another interpretation that in hebrew mother means giver of life, which might be from the same origin.
@@douglasfell4199 I think you might have misunderstood what I was saying about “father”. I wasn’t talking about gender equality, lol (but I thank you for thinking about that angle) ! I was using it as an example of how words (ought to, in my head) start out being concrete referents to something one can touch (like “father” for the person you call “dad”) to the more abstract - like “Father in Heaven” or God. A thousand years later, you might say the word “father” meant, say, “one who provides” (an abstract referent) while the most primitive form of the word probably meant “my dad” (a person you can touch). I was using that example as a way to explain why I had expected “ma” to first be a referent to a person, and only later generalized to “anyone who gives”. I’m coming from a child development angle here. Since “Ma” is one of the easiest and first sounds that a baby makes (“bah” is another) , I figured that it would also be among the easiest and first consonants that primitive man might make and attach meaning to. Again, just being a student here… sorry if I’m being annoying… not meaning to!
@@margaretford1011 I have not looked into the word father or mother sorry. My research is to understand placenames in lowland Scotland with a paleo Hebrew / punic origin. Mael for instance means high priest however it evolved into old Welsh to mean prince. As the first born was to be king the second born was to be high priest ie moses and Aaron, so mael can be high priest and prince both can be correct. As roman Catholic and latin took over in the 8th and 9th centuries hebrew language went into decline only placenames remain. Main is another word meaning stone in old welsh, however you can speculate that perhaps very early it meant stone sacrifice alter, ma giver and en meaning people or the people who make sacrifice and the meaning evolved as they do.
My suspicion is that "honey" may have been a first word. Indo-European and Chinese use a base of "Mi" in its various pronunciations. Describing the longest-lasting / sweetest natural substance would be significant in human development.
In Sumerian-- our oldest written language-- the word for honey is "lal". I haven't much been in favor of a monogenesis for language, but as noted in the video, it is easy for words to change over time such that it is sometimes hard to reconstruct them. This is particularly true when there isn't a means by which to write them down and preserve some phonology, etc. Regardless, it is fun to try and go back as far as we can to discern the origins of human speech.
Khazakstan is like the Middle of Earth. And this evolution of proto-euroasian languanges would have been interesting for J.R.R. Tolkien. Men would have competed with older and far more interesting speices of men that came before them too, if we go all the way back 30,000 years or more.
Even with comparative linguistics, sometimes languages may change so drastically that without written records, it would be almost impossible to trace them. Suppose we only had a spoken record for French, and little or no written records over time of French, either directly or recorded by others. Then in several words, we'd have not enough evidence for how they were derived. Instead of eau, we'd have [ o ]; instead of août, we'd have [ u ]. Neither the spoken nor the written forms look enough like aqua and Augustus to easily tell they are derived from those, and the sound changes are drastic, albeit reconstructible. So at times, even when words may be entirely cognate with older historical forms, they have changed so much over time, that they are not at all obvious. French is like this, even though it's as old as the other Latin-derived languages. In other cases, French has not reduced nearly so much, so it's more readily traceable. But this is one of many problems with the comparative approach, even though it ought to be most useful. Yes, it's possible some very old words would be retained over longer time. Words for mother and father, other kingship terms, a few others, might be very old, but also, words can change due to misunderstandings, taboo modification, or new fads, or loss via some accident of separation.
For the reasons you state here is why linguists in the study have not identified a plethra of very old words. Because for so many reasons words change so much over millenia that only a few are able to be backtraced through key roots and language families to ancienct ancestral word forms.
Yes, as language changes so much over time, and so another 5,000 years it would be significantly different. English wasn't even a language 5,000 years ago.
That topics warrants much more video coverage. In fact, this video is More of a stub and much too short ;) Some interesting points: Victor Mair has an interesting, somewhat speculative article on the connection between Indo -European languages and sinitic languages based (among others) on the similarity of Chinese ‘te’ and germanic teugt (Dutch deugd, German Tugend, tüchtig, Latin (vir)tus ). Similarly, I noted Chinese moha - English mother, German Mutter, also Chinese ‘muutsi’, Chinese ‘fuutsi’ for pater / father / Vater, ‘sisjoo’ for sister / Schwester / (Russian) sistra (note, I made the transliteration ‚up’ based on my hearing).
So do linguists believe that all the world’s languages evolved from one source? Are the languages you mentioned all the world’s family of languages? Love the videos, you’re awesome.
in the German language there are so-called Lal words, baby words like Ham'han, Da'da, Wuf'wuf, Ka'ka, Pi'pi. These are not baby words, but parallelism terms that allow to reconstruct the Ur language. The term Ka'a for shit, refers to the fire. Cow dung > cow shit, burns. Once this is understood, one can validly reconstruct the migration of the HuMan of Cameroon via Ka'ka.
@@RealUvane Yes In know that. But the most important technologie is the fire. For Germany we have the words Ka´ka, Fer´fer > Feuer + Firde > Fere and Ra´ra, also Asch. The name of my mother family is Sus (Süß).. In Fersia, in Persia, susu neans fire. Als we are colled Germania. We are are Fermania. There are some city you can chanhe to Fer, lieke Speyer > Spefer, Erfufur > Ferfurt, Gera > Fera. Also several word lieke Kiefer, a tree, Ferkel, a pig, Efer > Eber > a pig. In Skandinavia, in Finnland, we habe a lot of Ka´ka words in the sector of cookung. Then the Karibu also, the Reindder. I believe, the are several waurd in norway to. The migration was over Germany > Fermania, too.
@@robertbrockmann7576 the fire is also a symbol of the intellect. Like the “egyption” god Khnum, aka Amon/Ares, God of intellect known as a flaming sword.
Warning to those watching this: These sorts of studies are often on very shaky ground, even pseudolinguistics in the worst cases. The phylogenetic tree is also ratehr worthless, as modern linguistics really cannot determine these sorts of pre-family relationships. The inclusion of Altaic, a widely discredited family, in the tree is a nail in the coffin for credibility.
There was an older language, either with a common origin with the Uralic languages or with the Anatolic groups. The Indoeuropeans had the majority of their DNA from the Ancient North Eurasians who lived farther to the north-east, so the ancestors to modern Sami, Estonians and Finns look like a good guess for a common genetic and cultural ancestor.
@@blugaledoh2669 But it's not a serious one. Huge preponderance of evidence shows black sea/steppe "theory" is fact. Everything from DNA, to horse domestication, to other archaeology, to linguistics. Uralic DNA is not steppe DNA. Turkish DNA is not(Western) Steppe DNA, although Celts founded Ankara, so there's still IE DNA in the area. American Indians are close DNA cousins to Indo-Europeans through ANE DNA, and much closer than the Uralics who are acknowledged to be genetically and culturally completely separate. Sami were the indigenous people that IE scandinavians pushed out.
@Blugale Doh No, language and DNA are not the same, but they often “move together.” 10-15,000 years ago they certainly moved together much much more than they do today. So it makes sense to suspect that corresponding DNA trails and linguistic trails might indicate movements of a single group of people. A DNA trail is not proof positive of a linguistic trail, nor is a linguistic trail proof positive of the movement of people. But, combined with other evidence, the correspondence of DNA and linguistic trails can be pretty compelling.
I feel like you set up a very interesting question in each of your videos, but basically gloss over it. I wish you’d actually give a more thorough dive into these words. You give a lot of summary of the history, but this video needed a more concrete history of specific words. Discuss what those words look like in modern languages and trace them back in time. Maybe a separate video on “worm”?
fascinating stuff. If I could be so bold, the audio content would benefit from processing with a de-esser plugin. The speech pattern of the presenter and the sibilance of the microphone are kind of compounding. You could also look into using a close mic like a Shure SM7 which is inherently not sibilant.
My understanding is that all prosimians, simians, and primates really freak out over snakes, implying that it is built into our DNA since prosimians developed from whatever. Hence, the word “wyrm” being conserved does not require dragons existed, just that people jerk when they see anything that looked like one.
You show the reconstructed phylogenetic tree of languages, and I'm curious how this compares with other evidence. If we look at the dragon myth, do we find a similar tree? What about with the underworld guardian dog? The cosmic hunt? And other myths? What do we know about the phylogenetic relationships of cultures that predate PIE? E.g. the graph you show seems to support Indo-Uralic, does an analysis of mythology also support this? Do we even know at the moment? I'd be curious to see how many myths followed the same paths compared to which myths followed different ones.
Phylogenetics used known linguistic evolution paths within their calculations, and so dpeendent on the particular research, the answer is yes, we try to use the latest reviewed data where possible from when research starts.
Now that is very interesting indeed, as next week I will post a video about the origin of the flood myth, and that has a lot of potential. Thank you for watching and sharing.
Don't shoot me down too harshly here, but I've had a notion for a while that the flying fire breathing worm/dragon myths describe lightning. Thinking especially of horizontal lightning. When it hits the ground it often starts fire. The accompanying thunder could be mistaken for a roar. I would think this all could get pretty terrifying if you were caught sitting by yourself out on the steppes.
That is a good thought, not one I would prescribe to because I am aware of how those serpents were perceived, but that would make a good motif in a myth.
My experience with Austronesian languages in the Philippines is that, yes, pronouns and particles are commonly similar across different languages, while there is a wide variation in nouns and adjectives and adverbs. There are some very common verbs which are similar across many languages.
Great channel @crecganford. I live in North Carolina, USA and I noticed that rural farmers of my grandfather's generation frequently named their milk cows Bossy, resembling the old Latin name "bos" for cow and also used the word "sooie" to call their hogs, resembling the Latin "sus." Ancient things seem to be retained on the fringes of civilization. For example, one musicologist claimed that certain themes in Appalachian Mountain zither music could be traced back to ancient Sumer where the zither supposedly originated. Could you venture a guess of how these old names for cow and pig were retained for so long and what their origin may have been? Thanks.
That is interesting, and something I have not considered, and no obvious cognate spring to mind of why these evolution of the word occurred. I will keep an eye open on my journey through books in case this ever comes up.
Self Referential Verbs for "To Exist" seems to be in many languages to be "irregular" verb. That is not follow same conjugations patterns of other verbs.
@@beadingbusily Germanic, Latin, & Japanese Base Languages for Modern Business [though South Korean (which I know not their existanals) is quickly rising].
I think drum might be a pretty old word. It’s trom, tromme, trommel, trumma, etc in Europe, tam-tam or tabla in Hindi, tabl in Arabic, drama in Bengali… all sort of sound like drum or trom across thousands of miles and many, many Indo-European languages.
From a purely academic perspective, I would like to ask if you consider yourself spiritual or even religious. The reason for this is that there is often implicit bias in the way someone expresses themselves. I've watched a good number of your videos at this point (actually, I watch them all the way through every time I see them in my suggestions because they're so interesting), and I figured the answer to this question would help me enjoy your videos even more. As a token gesture, I'll subscribe to your channel and like every video of yours I watch from now on, regardless of whether you choose to answer this question. Thanks for taking the time to read my comment :)
I'm an academic first, and so I don't consider myself religious or spiritual, not in the traditionally sense anyway, but I feel the psychology of our ancestors had benefits in how they approached life, and this interests me and in a way influences me in how I think, and this is partly because it helps my work in understanding the myths, and partly because I feel their "simpler" life has some benefits over how we live today. But also consider that faith was not something many people living 5,000+ years ago had, they were far more focused on ritual, and so we're not really comparing similar concepts anyway. I hope that helps answer your question.
@@Crecganford It answers it very well. Thank you for the response. I think your point of view is very well suited to what you're trying to accomplish with this channel. I hope you have a nice day, and I'll make sure to make good on that token of good faith in the future.
Old egyptian term for the scarab, which is a beetle -> Kepher or Cheperer todays german word for beetle --------------------------------> Käfer or Kaepher almost the same spelling and pronunciation. Coincidence or is there a PIE/Indo-germanic origin?
I wasnt paying attention I had your lecture in the background I was off in my thoughts until you said the word "worm". I had thought often about this word and what connotations ancients had about them and what they called them. I have no problem getting my hands dirty to find some annelids
I get the jump from "worm" to "snake" but to go from there to "dragon" seems a bit of a stretch. I always assumed dragon myths came from finding pterosaur fossils.
Wyrm was a word used in the middle ages to describe dragons and serpents, and so I don't think it is a stretch to far. Old Norse has many examples of this.
My beliefs answer the question of the first word. While in a tree stand archery hunting and watching the chipmunks, I finally got evolution. It was a light bulb that came on over 40 years ago. Foxes are sly, giraffes have long necks, rabbits turn on a dime and humans are problem solvers. We don't realize to the extent. Everything you own is a solution to a problem-your shoes, socks, shirt, car, house, tires on your car, pencil, eraser on the pencil: all solutions to problems. We have evolved into this starting with homo erectus. If you could not solve the problems associated with the ice age then your line dies off and the solvers live. Your ancestors solved WW1, WW2, the plague in London, Fall of Roman empire, etc. For recreation we play games that are problems. We watch movies to see how others solve problems. Why would you be happy to win the lottery? Because you could solve ANY problem. After "da-da", "ma-ma", "bye-bye" the first word you learn is "no", which is for solving potential problems. Therefore, I am pretty sure that "no" was our first word. Why did they build stonehenge? I don't know. I do know it was to solve a problem. On a side note, I love your statues. The Indians in my area made a wing bone turkey call. I call in turkeys with my mouth. Indians surely could and are known for great mimicry as noted in Darwin's trip on the beagle and others. Why build a wing bone when they can perfectly mimic a turkey call? For the spirit of the bird-same as that cave lion statue.
I like the idea. It’s fun to think about all the problems one can solve. Of course, there are so many big problem one can’t solve. Those are frustrating. I wonder if that is where situational depression comes from. Problems one doesn’t feel they can solve. (I don’t mean the brain chemical kind) I know I find daily joy and satisfaction in problem solving.
@@V.Hansen. When looking, like me, as humans being built for problem solving your reply is spot on. This world view of mine is titillated by people who live their lives without any earthy possessions. This means they are trying to live without solving problems. They claim to find peace with this. So is a dog better off using his nose or abstaining from using his nose? IDK. I do know that too many problems spiral a person into a nervous break down. On a side note, I believe that religion is like the radiator of a car. Your brain is like a high performance motor that is cooled down by religion. Someone with religion is better off than I when dealing with many things. For example, if I were in a car wreck and needed to NOT go into shock, I am ill equipped. From personal experience depression is healed by time. To someone with depression, please just hold on. Men are more likely to die from suicide even though women attempt it more often. Time heals all wounds. Thank you for the reply.
@@onenewworldmonkey I don’t know. It seems to me that living with less stuff is just solving problems in a different, more simple way. Less stuff- less problems, for sure. But staying alive requires at least a few problems to be solved. And rejecting possessions is solving several problems in itself. Fun problems to contemplate 🤔
This is something I've been hypothesizing for a while now. One of my favorite series is Earth's Children. And while it's heavily outdated in some of its information, there were ideas that made a lot of sense, at least ideas I had. The main character herself sounds like an origin story for many of the myths we know such as Pandoras box and even Atlanta, as well as the idea of Centaurs, and possibly Artemis. Obviously, the main character is a made up person who only exists in our historical fantasy worlds. But still...the idea still remains that a lot of the common myths we know today could have completely ordinary origins and real life inspirations, just heavily exaggerated. The main character is the first to tame and ride horses, and because of this, when she sees new people, they can't distinguish the difference between human and animal, which makes them fearful of her. This is easily believable to be an origin story of Centaurs. Not with her, but literally with whoever the first person to ride horses was, more than likely a man. This is also a time when the mega fauna will still be around, with some prey...some predators. It's pretty easy to think there might be a giant flying lizard that shoots fire or whatever.
Interesting. I'm also into The Earth Children Books but unfortunately, the 7th book was utter garbage and ruined Ayla and Jondalarxs characters. I literally pretend it doesn't exist. Your take on centaurs is very likely. I also think Auel wrote this as Ayla being like myths. She was larger than life, an amalgamation of many people. She wasn't just the first to ride a horse. She was the first to domesticate a wolf, invented the needle, discovered flint, was the first to figure out man impregnated a woman...which I find utterly ridiculous. While this belief has been recorded, lions understand fathership and kill other male's babies. Chimpanzee females mate with all the males because if she doesn't, the ones that didn't mate her will kill the baby...or at least try. Anyway, that was a rambling comment but I agree with your take.
@@johnmboon no, sorry, Atlanta. She was a Greek princess who was very skilled at many sports. Don't remember the whole story off the top of my head, but basically she's the one who lost a foot race against her future husband because he kept throwing shiny apples on the ground to distract her lol. Her qualities, though, were on par with the main character, being very skilled in many different sports like archery and, of course, foot races.
@@TheRagingPlatypus thank you. I appreciate it. I didn't exactly read the last book, I listened to it on RU-vid. Because of that, I was able to actually look up the caves and the pictures on the wall, and felt like I was going through the caves with her. This made those parts of the last book more interesting and engaging for me. However...yea. I had problems with the last book, too lol. I have the whole set now and will read it just for the sake of having actually read it, but...probably won't again lol. Just a nice shelf edition. It wasn't just what they did with their relationship, but his character altogether just was really annoying and unrealistic to me. He sounded like the trope guy you'd find in a romance novel for women. And...I did find the sex a bit gratuitous. I also agree, if she was able to figure out paternity, then others should've long before. What didn't make sense to me was they already had a sort of idea of it, they knew if they honored the mother, there was a chance that man's spirit would help create a baby. Seems like a no brainer from that point. But it was also the part that felt like pandoras box origin, since the after math was the patriarchal societies we see in history spring up shortly after, causing men to want to be more certain they're raising their own. I think it was when she heard her own story be told in a mythical way that made me start wondering if that's possibly how we got our myths that we know today, from people doing what we would see as ordinary things, such as taming a wolf or riding a horse, and it being turned into the story of Artemis or Chiron.
I don't have a reference, but I remember someone expressing the opinion that "alfalfa" was one of the oldest words and originally meant something like "good fodder."
The serpent and the dragon are the oldest known mythological concepts known to man. They are present in practically every set of cultural myths, probably for *very good reason.* Therefore, notions involving them are likely the oldest words and ideas in human language, obviously.
Disagree with the mythological term. What we now call dinosaurs, the world used to call dragons. Same animals, just different word. And yes, there is much evidence they and we existed at tge same time so there would have been a word for them.
@@M4th3u54ndr4d3 i have seen fossilized foot prints with human print on top of dinosaur print. And every culture has stories of "dragons". Dragon is what we used to call dinosaurs. The American Indians talked about them. If we didnt exist at the same time, how do ancient cultures have stories of them which predate modern archeological discoveries?
@@nooneyouknowhere6148 mythological concept simply means an idea consistently present in a long sequence of ancestral myths. Dragons, dinosaurs, flying serpents, lizardmen, aliens, it doesn't matter what we map to the ideas, only that the ideas predate the mapping. Thus, dragons and serpents are *the oldest known mythological concept,* i.e., it has much ado about our origins.
It’s been said that the word ‘mother’ derives from the sound made by a baby wanting to suckle. ‘Mother’ and ‘father’ in Mandarin Chinese is ‘moochin’ and ‘foochin,’ cognates
According to Dante's Divine Comedy, when Dante was in Paradise, Adam (the first man) conveyed to Dante that the language inside Eden was intuitive. That they had a direct connection with God and thus spontaneously spoke. I think this is an important clue as to the origins of language being first of all intuitive. There are all sorts of "Light Language" videos that are just people speaking in tongues, to put it frankly. According to these Light Language people, they are just speaking what comes intuitively, not a known language, or understandable language. I believe language came to humans intuitively through singing, dancing, and imitating animal sounds. I've read/ heard that ancient Egyptians believed animals spoke the language of the gods. Going across the world into North America, the native peoples there have very unique languages, and the origins of many tribal languages are that the language was "given". To me, it makes sense. Its possible you would watch animals all the time to figure out what is best to eat, where the good water is. You pick up on their sounds, you imitate their sounds. Pretty soon the sound is associated with the good place to find food. I often thing of joy bringing laughter, laughter bringing dancing, dancing bringing song. Also I wanted to point out the Enochian language of Angels, and St. Hildegard of Bingen's language. Both are mysterious in origin. I have no scholarly credit to make these assumptions, language is just fascinating to me.
Very good series, it would be interesting to see the various words discussed in their ancient forms. Also, you should really talk to Randall Carlson about dragon myths, his and your research have some very interesting correlations.
There is a paper (I do not have it handy) that shows how all primates have an inate fear of snakes. It would not be surprising that we would have a primordial word for our oldest foe that has made it through the ages with little innovation attached to it.
What is interesting is some of the oldest myths we have about snakes, and the rituals around killing them. I will do a video on this soon, it is fascinating how some of these myth link together. Thanks for watching and taking the time to comment, it is appreciated.
in the German language there are so-called Lal words, baby words like Ham'han, Da'da, Wuf'wuf, Ka'ka, Pi'pi. These are not baby words, but parallelism terms that allow to reconstruct the Ur language. The term Ka'a for shit, refers to the fire. Cow dung > cow shit, burns. Once this is understood, one can validly reconstruct the migration of the HuMan of Cameroon via Ka'ka.
Humans seem to be the exception, then, since babies, when shown pictures or toys of snakes, or real snakes, do not have a negative reaction to them. Same with spiders.
@@pentelegomenon1175 Sorry, I thought you meant the theory that all languages came from one proto-language in Africa. That there was an Afro-Asiatic language, I have no opinion, but it looks like somebody worked that theory out in the nineties and it has stalled since then.
I'm a classicist originally and have reasonable knowledge of German in addition to the Romance languages. I have had a few lessons in Hebrew and Russian too and the relationship between and evolution of languages fascinate me. Your talk didn't specifically mention the Semitic languages and I saw - ooh, fifty years ago - the proposition that common features such as gender and plural forms could be indicative of common ancestry. My knowledge of modern languages outside these two families is zero. Basque would be an interesting topic for analysis.
I am highly suspicious of the word know in English because it has the sole connection to gnosis in Greek which is a language that has little other influences
There is a bewildering number of videos on your channel. How about a suggested ordered watching list for people like me, who has little prior knowledge of the field of study?
You mentioned using statistics to help determine word ancestry/morphology, but I didn't hear you mention the statistical process used. Are we talking about a method like TF/IDF?
The process used is called phylogentics, and layers word use (and this can be applied to stories and motifs) across known human dispersals, to see if they can have a common root. There is a paper referenced and linked to, within the video's description.
Hmm, I've an outlandish question I've been exploring for the past year or two and your mention here of the conservation of the word 'worm' relates somewhat... Could the wyrm/serpent/dragon myth have evolved from a figurehead used to describe firstly the monolithic/megalithic stone working crafts, then, later, have been associated with the metal working crafts....? This follows the possibility that fire-setting - working stone by way of weakening it with fire, was at the root of early stone working exploits and that the obscelete logic of that way of working largely defined the evolution of megalithic works around the world - inspiring it to re-evolve again and again - an over-looked, pre-metal step in our technological development. I wonder if, in a world populated by hunter-gatherers using animal symbols to describe different crafts/specialisms/legacies, whether the wyrm or snake was used as an anology of those burrowing, stone working activities... Which eventually evolved into mining and metal working. I wonder if that work, or those who did it, developed an ominous reputation also... Perhaps feared by those remaining in the wild, causing the dragon to become a contentious symbol, promising great riches on the one hand but desolation on the other. ...The association there with the crafts later being lost as esoteric meanings were applied and people became divided from those activities through evermore elaborate specialisation. A big subject with far too much to write in comments, but the anology of the dragon or serpent has a curious habit of turning up right where it might be expected if the above holds some truth... E.g. the Pendragon sitting above the sword in the stone (i.e. analogous of metalworking)... Or, tantalisingly, beneath the mountain, on a hoard of precious metals... breathing fire... Or sat in the garden of Eden bringing an end to our age of innocence. Well, aye, a personal obsession I thought might intrigue you.
I'd love to know more about the connections between these parent languages, and about pre-Columbian contacts between the Old and New Worlds in general. Is proto-Altaic in vogue among scholars again? Last I checked it was facing some skepticism.
Well for old world and new world Yenadise-dene language family exist search up Ket and Dene For Proto-Altaic just ignore it there has never any serious support for it since the USSR collapsed in 1995 or 6 when ever it collapsed as a whole Proto-Altaic is like big foot anyone who actually believes in it is crazy.
The related language families are purely hypothetical. No linguistic connection could be found between any of these languages. In fact, some linguists are even trying to connect Turkish to a Altaic language family, which includes Mongolian, Korean and Japanese.
Well of course a language group that was never recorded and never spoken is hypothetical but a similar kind of argument could be used to dispute evolution, or the science behind how the earth was created. Pre-historic academia has to infer things, it is just the level of confidence you have in the evidence that makes a difference, and so I'm not sure of your point, unless it is that you don't think languages evolved as stated in the paper which is well referenced. Then please state what you think they have wrong.
I have often wondered if any place names in Eurasia were originally from a Neanderthal or Denisovan origin (perhaps inherited with heavy modification). Makes one wonder. Also read an article claiming that the English word for “shrimp” may have pre-IndoEuropean and possible autochthonous Paleolithic origins in Northern Europe. But, for the life of me, I can’t find that paper!
Several Native American nation's have common words or stem with Kazakh. For example: айналайын, күн, тау, жер, су (aınalaıyn, kún, taý, jer, sý). Айналайын (aınalaıyn) nowadays meaning "oh, dear/love", but the stem Айналу (Aınalý) came from shamanism or zoroastrianism, which means "surround sth." in Kazakh.
The dragon myth, one of the most common myths from around the world, may not have been a myth but a celestial plasma electrical Aurora Borealis type phenomenon witnessed around the world during a global extinction level event, possibly the Younger Dryas comet catastrophe of about 13,000 years ago. Comparative mythologist, David Talbott, in his seminal "The Saturn Myth" tackles the conundrum of ancient myths describing dazzling and destructive events in the heavens, events that may have kick started all religion and the astronomer priesthoods that accompanied them. Check out "Remembering the End of the World" on the Thunderbolts RU-vid Channel.
Cam, as in camber. The Ka is assyrian originally shape of open mouth the meaning curve. The modern hebrew for roundabout it kitkhar from same origins along with ancient greek hippocampus.
Oh. Now I start to see. Finnish "thou" is "sinä", but is comes from "tinä" Snake = käärme indeed has some elements in common with "worm" etc. And dragon is "lohikäärme" "salmonsnake"...
“Loks” is an ultra-conserved word with almost no change in pronunciation and means “salmon” or “river fish.” We still use the word “lox” to mean sliced salmon meat.
Yeah, I was actually interested in the video & was wondering if he was gonna talk about wonderworts, then half way through I was like "god damn it, this is just a proto-nostratic pseudo-theory."
my favorite non-ie words are sea and soul (german see + seele) from proto-germanic saiwa + saiwalo, so soul = coming from the sea. as ie pastoralists came from landlocked countries it makes sense they adopted the word northern europeans used. what fascinates me is the little insight into spiritual concepts of these people.
How old is the wheel? My understanding is that a lot of the proto-indo-europeans had religions that were based on a seasonal calendar, with festivals etc often situated at equinoxes and solstices and specific times of the year (harvest/Autumn, planting/Spring), and that the six part wheel or 8 part wheel were common symbols, and that the word for wheel is ancient. I have also heard that the word Yule came from this old word for wheel. Can you confirm or contradict any of this?
Lots of questions! So PIE weren't a culture just many people who spoke the same language. The wheel is probably around 6,000 years old, but it took a while to work out to use it to aid transport. It was used in pottery and toys before that. And yes, I would say all cultures would have had a seasonal calendar of sorts, in it's basic form, 2 seasons, when plants grew and when they didn't, then this went to four seasons with the solstices splitting things, and then 8. I can try and cover that development in a video in the future if you want more information about the calendar. The earliest one we have (as a stone circle) is in Nabta Playa, Egypt, almost 10,000 years old if I remember correctly
I’m unsure of the contemporaneity, but there are some Khemetic words that predate the Giza pyramid, such as Netjeru (Nature) and Ne (No) -> Nefer (from Source) Hi, my ‘God’ name is No
I think oldest word is something like mama. There are so many languages from different parts of word using this word that is must be very old and came from times when we lived in one area and we weren't split over world.
