Reconstructing Cognates

Language or Family	I	You	Plural Ending	Older Brother	Think
Indo-European	me	tu, te			med-
Uralic	-m	ti, te	-t	aka	mett
Mongol	mini	ti	-t	aqa	mede
Korean	-ma				mit
Chuk-chu	-m	-t	-ti		mirelhen
Eskimo	-ma	-t	-t		misiyaa

The meanings of these words are not always exactly the same as the column heading, but clearly derive from it. For example, mitelhen in Chukchi means "expert," mit in Korean is "to believe," and mede in Mongol means "to know." A broad and relative interpretation of word meaning is in itself an important feature of how linguists such as Joseph Greenberg probe farther back in time tracing language evolution. Loans from other languages and coincidences may intervene, but there are a number of good reasons why these sources of error do not seriously interfere with conclusions about how languages relate. The list of cognate words is limited to those least susceptible to change over time and therefore unlikely to be loaned from other languages. It is highly improbable that there should be multiple coincidences for numerous words drawn from a large number of languages.

If we take languages closely related to those listed in the table, the similarities increase. For example, the first person singular pronoun in ancient Japanese is mi, older brother is also aka in Turkish, the Japanese of Ryukyu island, and in many of the Ainu languages. The Ainu once inhabited the whole Japanese archipelago, but today only live on Hokkaido and farther north in the Sakhalin islands. They are physically distinctive from Japanese as well as speaking a different language.

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