ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2013
Ultraconserved words point to deep language ancestry across Eurasia.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2013. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 30 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
30 citing papers in PubMed, 226 citations in OpenAlex.
- West Eurasian mtDNA lineages in India: an insight into the spread of the Dravidian language and the origins of the caste system.Human genetics · 2015Trial
- The counting principle makes number words unique.Corpus linguistics and linguistic theory · 2025Article
- Article
- Unsupervised discovery of family specific vocal usage in the Mongolian gerbil.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
- The time and place of origin of South Caucasian languages: insights into past human societies, ecosystems and human population genetics.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Diachronic semantic change in language is constrained by how people use and learn language.Memory & cognition · 2022Article
- Curating and extending data for language comparison in Concepticon and NoRaRe.Open research Europe · 2022Article
- Genetic Analysis of Hexaploid Wheat (International journal of molecular sciences · 2021Article
- The vocal tract as a time machine: inferences about past speech and language from the anatomy of the speech organs.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Article
- The sounds of prehistoric speech.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Review
- Article
- Biocultural diversity of common walnut (Ecology and evolution · 2020Article
- Dialects of Madagascar.PloS one · 2020Article
- Demonstrative Reference and Semantic Space: A Large-Scale Demonstrative Choice Task Study.Frontiers in psychology · 2020Article
- High-fidelity copying is not necessarily the key to cumulative cultural evolution: a study in monkeys and children.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2019Article
- Dominant words rise to the top by positive frequency-dependent selection.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2019Article
- Article
- Global-scale phylogenetic linguistic inference from lexical resources.Scientific data · 2018Article
- A Bayesian phylogenetic study of the Dravidian language family.Royal Society open science · 2018Article
- Evolutionary dynamics of language systems.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2017Article
Corrections and comments
- Commented on by
- Commented on by
- Commented on by
Authors and funding
4 authors at 3 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The search for ever deeper relationships among the World's languages is bedeviled by the fact that most words evolve too rapidly to preserve evidence of their ancestry beyond 5,000 to 9,000 y. On the other hand, quantitative modeling indicates that some "ultraconserved" words exist that might be used to find evidence for deep linguistic relationships beyond that time barrier. Here we use a statistical model, which takes into account the frequency with which words are used in common everyday speech, to predict the existence of a set of such highly conserved words among seven language families of Eurasia postulated to form a linguistic superfamily that evolved from a common ancestor around 15,000 y ago. We derive a dated phylogenetic tree of this proposed superfamily with a time-depth of ~14,450 y, implying that some frequently used words have been retained in related forms since the end of the last ice age. Words used more than once per 1,000 in everyday speech were 7- to 10-times more likely to show deep ancestry on this tree. Our results suggest a remarkable fidelity in the transmission of some words and give theoretical justification to the search for features of language that might be preserved across wide spans of time and geography.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.