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A book has revealed how to talk like a stone-age man, with the meanings of words related the shapes lips form when they are said

Here’s how to talk like a stone-age man: say the word ‘pu’. Your mouth is pursed, your nose is narrowed. You are blowing out a breath, as if to dispel a bad smell.

In the Stone Age, the sound pu meant exactly what it means today.

This is how language began. The earliest words in English date back at least 8,000 years — and they describe themselves: we can work out what the words meant by the shapes our lips form when we say them.

‘Pe’, for instance, is different from pu. It starts with the lips together and separates them with a faint pop. Pe means open and the ancient sound is at the core of the modern word open. ‘Mei’ means smile and it makes you do exactly that — your mouth stretches wide, showing your teeth. Once again, the old sound is at the centre of today’s word: smile.

Our everyday words have evolved from this language spoken by our Stone Age ancestors. Simple, instinctive and easy to learn, it was born on the steppes of modern Russia and swept through Europe, Asia and India, changing and developing.

We don’t know who spoke it first, and it doesn’t even have a proper name. Archaeologists call it proto-Indo-European, or IE.

Experts have uncovered several hundred of its basic sounds. Investigate them and you will uncover astonishing details from history and hundreds of quirky connections in our everyday vocabulary.

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The Breath Of Life

One of the basic sounds of Stone Age language is ‘an’. It means to breathe, and it’s an imitation of the noise itself. Any creature, human or animal, that is alive must be breathing. ‘Man’ is a combination of two concepts as old as time. The ‘m’ sound, for me, myself, and the breathing ‘an’ sound. ‘Man’ is my own living-and-breathing self.

The word doesn’t change in Anglo-Saxon, Middle English, Icelandic, Dutch and Swedish, and it was barely different in the ancient Indian language of Sanskrit, where it was manu.

Bright Ideas

Neolithic farmers had many words for light. There was ‘bhal’, the blazing brilliance of the sun and ‘luh’, the luminous intensity of the full moon. And then there was ‘diw’, the bright daylight.

Ancient man worshipped the sun and so ‘diw’ is the beginning of deities, days and the divine. To the Romans, the chief god was the father (pater, in Latin) in the sky — diw-pater, or Jupiter.

In Latin, day is dies, and mal is bad. So if you’re having a bad day, that’s dismal. Someone who writes for a daily paper is a diurnalist — or journalist. When the sun rises, the daisies open — so-called because they’re the day’s eyes.

   

     

             

   

   

Our everyday words have evolved from this language spoken by our Stone Age ancestors

Tales of the Heart

Prehistoric man understood that the heart pumping is the drumbeat of life. ‘Krr’, the sound a taut rope makes when it is twanged, was his attempt to capture it in a word, and so ‘kard’ meant the heart.

That’s why, if you suffer a cardiac arrest, you need a cardiologist. It’s also why the middle of an apple is its core, and why generous, warm-hearted people are cordial. The other internal organs are the ‘karn’, giving us carnage, carnivore, carcass and carrion.

Carnal means fleshy. Carnival, the festival of flesh, was originally a meat-eating binge before the 40 days of fasting in Lent leading to Easter. And Easter signifies reincarnation — coming back in the flesh.

Dog Days

Stone Age nomads began to domesticate wolves several thousand years before the first farms, to guard against bears and to herd livestock.

‘Kuon’, meaning dog, evolved to give us canine, kennel, and also cynic — a word coined for a sect of ancient Greek philosophers, who believed life’s luxuries were a sham.

They earned their nickname because they had sex in the street, like dogs.

Of course, the first dogs had to be tamed, and the IE word for that is ‘dam’. That’s the origin of domestic, meaning fit for the home.

All animals were covered by the term ‘wos’. A horse was ak-wos, since ‘ak’ meant quick. The Romans spelled ak-wos as equus, so today a rider is an equestrian and anything to do with horses is equine.

Family Ties

Our ancestors’ language is the reason so many English words come in family groups. negative ones, for instance, have an ‘n’ at the front: no, never and nightmare.

The static ones begin with ‘sta’: stand, stall and stammer. The swollen ones start with ‘tu’: tubby, tulip and tumour. And the empty ones start with ‘va’: vacant, vacuum, vanity. And so on.

Eastern Promise

The word for dawn was ‘us’. The sound changed slightly to give us the direction from which the sun rises: the east.

The medieval English term for men who hailed from the East was Easterling and in the money markets of 13th-century London, the Easterlings controlled monopolies in wood, wheat, fur and flax.

They were the bankers of the time, and Easterling coin was the only money that mattered — we still call it sterling.

Plenty to Hide

A prehistoric chieftain showed his high status when he sat in his tent on a ‘pel’, or animal hide. Our word is pelt.

Early cups and bowls were also made from dried hide, so a basin in Latin is peluis. We pronounce it pelvis, the bowl-shaped bone that supports our own hide.

Pel also suggested an animal skin heaped with possessions or a bowl brimming over. By extension, ‘pel’ became many and dozens of words beginning ‘pl’ stem from this: plenty, plural, plus, plethora and plenitude, as well as surplus and replenish.

The Old Lags

When one of his herd was straggling, the Stone Age shepherd’s word was ‘lag’. Even now, to lag is to fall behind. In Old English, it was pronounced ‘laet’, meaning slow, sluggish or tardy. To be very ‘laet’ mean coming laetst, or — as we would say — last.

Leg also comes from lag, because a lame animal drags its leg. By the Middle Ages, to lag was thieves’ slang for stealing. That’s why in the classic sitcom Porridge, the habitual criminal Norman Stanley Fletcher was an old lag.

   

     

             

   

   

Experts have uncovered hundreds of basic sounds from the language archaeologists call proto-Indo-European

Mourning Glory

Prehistoric man took death seriously. We can decode some ancient funeral rituals from the old words and their modern meanings.

‘Mor’ is the IE root of mourn and also of moan. That implies that grieving was a noisy business.

The term for a violent death is murder and the word for regretting it is remorse.

For hundreds of years in England, mortal was the all-purpose intensifier, much as we use swearwords now. To be mortal cold was to be very flipping cold indeed.

In Victorian times, if you were so drunk you couldn’t stand, you were not just mortal drunk but mortallious.

Mamas and Papas

Mama means mother, and always has done: ‘ma’ sounds like the cry of a baby. Many words to do with birth contain this ‘ma’ sound. A baby is conceived in the marital bed (either before or after marriage) and grows under a maternity dress, inside the matrix — an old word for the womb. And all mammals suckle their young.

IE words have spread all over the world. From Mandarin to Arabic and Vietnamese to Welsh, the old word for father is based on the syllable ‘pa’.

To neolithic man, ‘pa’ meant to feed and protect. The father of the tribe became known as the patriarch. ‘Pa’ gives us power-words, such as patriotism and palace.

But the father’s role as a food provider also gives us many of our words for food, such as pasta, pastry and pâté — lots of things you might find in the pantry, in fact.

Blows and Flows

‘Bhleu’ gives us a real insight into the Stone Age mind. It describes the way that the wind blows and life flows. That’s why, when a flower opens, it blooms. Blood flows, too, and gives life.

Living Language

It’s been 250 years since scholars first guessed at the existence of a Stone Age language as the basis of English.

It was August Schleicher, a 19th-century German, who theorised that languages are living organisms that are born, bloom and die.

He even discovered the concept of evolution, years before Charles Darwin — but Schleicher applied it to words instead of animals.

So think before you speak. The words in your mouth are alive . . . and are as old as time.

Adapted from Written In Stone by Christopher Stevens, published by Virgin Books at £12.99 To order a copy (p&p free for a limited time) visit mailbookshop.co.uk

 

       

   

                         

               

         

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Sigmundr Úlfhéðinn, spring valley, United States, 2 years ago

The Germanic rune "ansuz" is the breath of life and the first rune taught, coincidence?

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Emms, Leeds, United Kingdom, 2 years ago

There are many noted similarities between the Welsh language and Hindi, also between the Welsh Mabinogion (medieval stories) and the Mahabarat (Sanskrit epic of ancient India). I have always wondered if this is just a relic of the IE language (being at the opposite extremes of the area it covered) or if there is some other weird connection back in the annals of time.

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And facts, Seattle, United States, 2 years ago

I think that 'Ah' is a good replacement for the sun. Because when my wife opens the blinds in the morning, and the bright sun shins in my eyes, I say "Ah!" My eyes!

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EmmaLou, Holmfirth, 2 years ago

I fail to see how 'experts' 'know' this. It's all conjecture.

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mt_jackson, Western Australia, Australia, 2 years ago

Interesting article but it was ruined by the One Million Years BC snippet. That's just taking the p!$$.

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Jesuis, Reading, 2 years ago

there is an algorithm for anything we want. 

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TheOmegaman, Bournemouth, United Kingdom, 2 years ago

It's all on record you know, very clever people the stone age people They invented the LP made of stone, then decided it made a good wheel.

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Budgie, Norwich, United Kingdom, 2 years ago

'Ug, ug, ug, ug, ug, ug?' 'No I've got a headache.'

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sjenner, Atlanta, 2 years ago

Great article. Frustratingly, a few of those posting seemed to have missed one of the big points this article makes about our shared linguistic heritage when posting derisively about relatedness between modern language. Yes, English and Welsh are rather close cousins. We're all Indo-European, and our linguistic roots are ancient. And today, that language group covers most of the globe, stretching from the Americas to India to the Eastern Edges of Russia. The sun never sets on it.

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Trudi, Worcester, United Kingdom, 2 years ago

There is actually an anglo saxon dictionary about 30 feet from where I'm sitting. It's huge and very comprehensive, they certainly weren't cavemen. But as expert as I am with a deck of tarot cards, their language is totally incomprehensible to me.

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