Table of Contents
BEST IELTS Academic Reading Test 506
IELTS ACADEMIC READING TEST 506 – PASSAGE – 3
IELTS ACADEMIC READING TEST – 506
READING PASSAGE – 3
ULTRACONSERVED WORDS
The idea that it is possible to trace the relationship between languages by comparing words with similar sounds and meanings seems obvious today, but there was little research in this field until the 1780s. That is when William Jones noted the similarity between Latin, Greek and Sanskrit, and proposed that they all derived from a common ancestral language. This idea is the basis for historical linguistics and has been used to trace the movements of people from place to place.
For instance, by comparing Romany with various Indian languages, it was possible to prove that India was the original homeland of the Roma people living in Europe. Traditionally, linguists have believed that it was impossible for words to exist in a recognisable form for more than nine thousand years. Recently, however, evolutionary biologist Mark Pagel and colleagues from the University of Reading in the UK claim to have traced a group of common words back to the language used by hunter-gatherers some fifteen thousand years ago.
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The team from Reading published a report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences indicating that they had found a group of what they termed ‘ultraconserved’ words that have survived since the last Ice Age. The researchers studied some two-hundred cognates – words that have a similar sound and a similar meaning in more than one language. For example, the English word mother has cognates in numerous languages, including madre in Spanish, mutter in German, mater in Latin, matar in Sanskrit, and mathair in Irish. The researchers examined commonly used words, because these are the ones which are less likely to change over time.
Seven major language families were studied, which together comprise over seven hundred individual modern languages: Altaic, which includes modern Turkish and Mongolian; Chukchi-Kamchatkan, which includes the languages of north-eastern Siberia; Dravidian, which includes languages spoken in southern India; lnuit-Yupik, which includes languages spoken in Alaska and other Arctic regions; Kartvelian, which includes Georgian and other languages spoken in the Caucasus region; and Uralic, which includes Finnish and Hungarian. About half of the world’s current population speaks one of the languages in these seven families, but the individual languages make for quite a diverse group; they do not sound alike, use a range of different alphabets and their speakers are widely separated geographically.
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When the researchers found cognates, they tried to translate these into ‘proto-words’ which they believed to be the common ancestral item of vocabulary. This required a knowledge of how sounds change when words move from one language to another; for example, the p sound in Romance languages (pisces in Latin and pesce in Italian) becomes an fin Germanic languages (fisch in German and fish in English).
The team then looked at these proto-words in relation to the languages in the seven families, and were gratified to find twenty-four that were shared by at least four of the language families, although frustratingly only one (thou) that was found in all seven. According to Pagel, however, all this points to the existence of a proto-Eurasiatic language, which was the ancestor of all the languages in these families. ‘We’ve never heard this language, and it’s not written down anywhere,’ he says, ‘But this ancestral language was spoken and heard. People sitting around campfires used it to talk to each other.’
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Some of the twenty-three ultraconserved words on the list are unsurprising: mother, you, me, this, what, not, man, fire. Others are rather unexpected: bark, worm, to spit, ashes. Pagel found the inclusion of the verb to give on the list heartwarming. ‘I was really delighted to see it there,’ he says. ‘Our society is characterised by a degree of cooperation and reciprocity that you simply don’t see in any other animal. Verbs tend to change fairly quickly, but that one hasn’t.’
The study’s conclusions are not without critics. Linguist Sarah Thomason from the University of Michigan in the USA is unconvinced and finds a number of flaws in it. She writes: ‘This is the latest of many attempts to get around the unfortunate fact that systematic sound-meaning correspondences in related languages decay so much over time that even if the words survive, they are unrecognisable as cognates … This means that word sets that have similar meanings and also sound similar after fifteen thousand years are unlikely to share those similar sounds as the result of inheritance from a common ancestor.’
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William Croft, a linguist at the University of New Mexico in the USA, is more sympathetic than many to the idea, and says that the use of methods from evolutionary biology makes the idea of a Eurasiatic superfamily more plausible. ‘It probably won’t convince most historical linguists to accept the Eurasiatic hypothesis, but their resistance may soften somewhat.’
Questions 27-32
Do the following statements agree with the views/claims of the writer of Reading Passage 3?
In boxes 27-32 on your answer sheet, write
YES – if the statement agrees with the views of the writer
NO – if the statement contradicts the views of the writer
NOT GIVEN – if it is impossible to say what the writer thinks about this
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27. William Jones was a pioneer in the field of historical linguistics.
28. Study of Romany has shown that it is most closely related to other European languages.
29. Linguists had overestimated how long words might exist in a recognisable form.
30. The National Academy of Sciences was impressed by Pagel’s research methods.
31. Pagel’s team studied words that begin with the same sound in various languages.
32. Pagel’s team concentrated on words which occur very frequently in the languages studied.
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Questions 33-37
Complete each sentence with the correct ending A-H below.
33. The languages in the families studied by Pagel’s team are
34. Dravidian is given as an example of a group of languages which are
35. The proto-words which Pagel’s team initially identified were
36. Pagel’s team was pleased to find a number of proto-words which are
37. Pagel’s team was disappointed not to identify more proto-words which were
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A. also the ancestor of the rest of the world’s languages.
B. common to all of the larger groups under consideration.
C. currently spoken by a significant proportion of the world’s inhabitants.
D. derived from cognates found across groups of languages.
E. likely to have similarities in their written form.
F. currently spoken in one specific geographical area.
G. marked by similarities in the way they are pronounced.
H. found in the majority of the language groups studied.
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Questions 38-40
Choose the correct letter, A 8, C or D.
38. Pagel was particularly pleased to find that ‘to give’ was an ultraconserved word because
A. it was one of the few verbs on the list.
B. it was one that he wouldn’t have predicted.
C. it reflects an enduring aspect of human behaviour.
D. it proves that some word classes are less likely to change.
39. Sarah Thomason is critical of Pagel’s study because
A. it was one of the few verbs on the list.
B. it was one that he wouldn’t have predicted.
C. it reflects an enduring aspect of human behaviour.
D. it proves that some word classes are less likely to change.
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40. William Croft puts forward the view that Pagel’s research
A. may help to make historical linguists more open to his ideas.
B. has made linguists more sympathetic to interdisciplinary studies.
C. puts forward a convincing case for a Eurasiatic superfamily of languages.
D. should have made more use of study methods from evolutionary biology.
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ANSWERS
27. YES
28. NO
29. NO
30. NOT GIVEN
31. NOT GIVEN
32. YES
33. C
34. F
35. D
36. H
37. B
38. C
39. D
40. A
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