Linguists identify 15,000-year-old ‘ultraconserved words’
Linguists identify 15,000-year-old ‘ultraconserved words’ that have descended largely unchanged from a language that died out at the end of the last Ice Age. Those few words mean the same thing, and sound almost the same, as they did then. The traditional view is that words can’t survive for more than 8,000 to 9,000 years. Evolution, linguistic “weathering” and the adoption of replacements from other languages eventually drive words to extinction. A new study suggests that's not always true.