Jing Hypothesis (Alternative)

TL;DR

The “Jing” hypothesis proposes a primordial word ŋan meaning “animating essence” or “soul” from ~15,000 years ago.
This proto-word would explain similar-sounding terms for spirit/soul across unrelated language families worldwide.
Evidence includes Persian jān (life/soul), Chinese jīng (essence), Thai khwǎn (soul), and Egyptian ka (life-force).
Sound changes over millennia could transform initial velars (ŋ/g/k) and vowels while preserving the core concept.
The hypothesis suggests conceptual continuity: breath = life = spirit across ancient human cultures.

Deep Proto-Word for “Soul” or “Spirit”: A Speculative Reconstruction

The “Jing” Hypothesis of an Ancient Life-Force Term#

Language families across the world often encode the notion of soul, spirit, or life-force in strikingly similar ways. The “Jing” hypothesis proposes that these similarities are not mere coincidence, but echoes of a primeval proto-word that meant an animating essence or vital life-force in a language spoken around 15,000 years ago, before the major language families diverged. According to this hypothesis, a word sounding roughly like gen / jin / jing once carried the meaning of soul or life-force, and its descendants (though heavily mutated) can be detected in far-flung languages today. This approach emphasizes conceptual continuity – the persistent idea of an immaterial life-essence – over strict phonological conservation. Apparent similarities in sound (e.g. a nasal consonant like n or ng, and a vowel like a or i) in words for “spirit” across Eurasia, Africa, Australia, and the Americas are treated not as chance, but as potential deep-time residues of an original term. Below, we refine the Jing hypothesis and explore the evidence for a global linguistic palimpsest: a single ancient word for the soul that may underlie diverse spiritual vocabularies.

Candidate Proto-Form and Meaning: ŋan (Animating Essence)#

Lacking direct records from 15 millennia ago, we can only reconstruct a speculative form. Based on cross-family phonosemantic patterns, a plausible proto-word for the psyche-life-force concept is « ŋan » (pronounced with a velar nasal “ng” sound). This hypothetical root combines a velar sound (perhaps k, g, or a nasal ŋ) with an “an” or “en” vowel-nasal sequence. It may originally have meant “breath, life, or animating spirit.” There is strong conceptual logic for this meaning: in many ancient cultures, breath was equated with life and spirit. If *ŋan meant “breath of life”, its semantic descendants could easily shift to “soul, spirit, vital essence.” Notably, the reconstructable Proto-Indo-European root (h₂)enh₁- (with an initial throat sound) meant “to breathe”, and yielded words for soul/spirit in later languages (Latin animus “soul, spirit,” Greek ánemos “wind” as life-breath). The proposed *ŋan is thus consistent with a primordial link between breathing and the soul. Phonetically, *ŋan would have been a simple, resonant syllable, suitable for an early human language. Over millennia, different languages could have preserved or transformed each element of this syllable – the initial velar, the vowel, the final nasal – in various ways. The result is a global scatter of kindred-sounding terms for the soul, which we now examine.

Pathways of Change Across World Regions#

If *ŋan was an ancient word for “animating essence,” how did it evolve as humanity’s languages diverged? Likely through a combination of sound shifts, semantic drift, and borrowing, ŋan would leave diverse reflexes:

Consonant Shifts: The initial velar nasal or stop (ŋ/g/k) might be lost or softened in some branches, yielding forms starting with a vowel or h-sound. For example, a hypothetical early form kan or ŋan could lose the initial consonant to become an in some languages, or change to a breathing sound h (since breath and spirit were linked) in others. This aligns with the fact that Proto-Indo-European h₂enh₁- “breathe” has an initial laryngeal (a sound like an h). In the Sino-Tibetan realm, we see Chinese 魂 hún “soul” (Old Chinese qʰuən), which starts with an h/q sound, and Thai khwǎn “soul” with kh- – these could reflect an ancient k/ŋ softened to a breathy consonant. In other cases, g or k may have been retained. For instance, the Egyptian word ka (the vital spirit or life-force in ancient Egyptian belief) begins with a velar consonant and might be a distant cousin in sound (if not by direct lineage).
Vowel Variations: The core vowel a in ŋan could shift to e, i, o, or u in different languages over time. Culturally, however, the central idea often stayed recognizable. For example, one line of development might have produced forms in i or ee: compare the Chinese 精 (jīng) “essence, life-force” (pronounced with an ee sound) and perhaps the echoed ji- in jinn, the Arabic term for a spirit or supernatural being. Another lineage might keep an a: e.g. Persian jān (pronounced jaan) meaning “life, soul”, or the Austronesian *qanitu (Proto-Malayo-Polynesian for “spirit of the dead”) which gave Malay hantu “ghost” (from qanitu). Even where the vowels differ, these words often carry similar meanings of an invisible life-force. Such resilience of meaning suggests an ancient origin.
Nasal Retention or Loss: The final -n or -ng of ŋan is a notable feature that may persist or disappear. In many languages, a nasal consonant in this position is indeed present in words for soul/spirit. Persian jān ends in -n, Chinese jīng ends in -ng, Thai khwan ends in -n, and Proto-Malayo-Polynesian qanitu had an -n (qani-). In other cases, the nasal might have dropped off due to phonetic erosion, especially in shorter words or through compounding. For example, Latin animus (from PIE an-mo-) ends with -mus rather than a simple -n, but the n is still visible. In Egyptian ankh (written Ꜥ-n-ḫ) the n is right in the middle of the triliteral hieroglyph for “life”. Even where the nasal is gone, often a vowel lengthening or a vowel nasalization remains as a trace. This widespread retention of a nasal element hints that the ancient root likely included a nasal sound that speakers found integral to the word’s identity.
Semantic Divergence: As the term spread and millennia passed, its meaning could expand or shift. The core idea of “animating life-force” might branch into related concepts: breath, spirit being, ghost, life, health, even mind. For instance, Latin animus came to mean not only “soul” but also “mind” or “courage” in Classical usage. The Chinese jīng 精 specifically denotes essence, especially refined essence (like the vital fluid in Chinese medicine). In Thai, khwan refers to an animistic life-force that can flee or be restored, but Thai also has winyaan (from Pali viññāṇa, consciousness) for the immortal soul – showing a split in the concept of soul. Such splits likely occurred elsewhere, with the proto-word sometimes specializing (e.g. meaning specifically a ghost of the dead in one culture, but the living soul in another). Nonetheless, the semantic alignment of words across cultures – revolving around life, breath, spirit, ghost, essence – remains remarkably strong evidence of a common origin. It suggests that wherever humans went, they carried not only the idea of an immaterial life-force, but perhaps even the seed of a word to name it.

Cross-Linguistic Echoes of the Proto-Soul Word#

Let us survey a range of language families for words echoing our hypothetical *ŋan:

Indo-European: The Proto-Indo-European (PIE) root h₂enh₁- meant “to breathe”, and very early on it likely yielded a noun for “breath/life.” In PIE-derived languages, we find Latin anima “breath, soul” and animus “spirit, mind”, Greek ánemos “wind” (the airy soul), and Sanskrit ániti “(he) breathes”. All of these come from an- (breath) and carry the concept of life’s animating air. An especially intriguing case is Persian jān “soul, life” – used endearingly as “dear” (literally soul) – which historians derive from an Indo-Iranian development of that same PIE an- root. In Avestan (ancient Iranian), vī-ān- gave viiānā- “spirit,” becoming Middle Persian gyān and modern Persian jān. The initial j (gy) in Persian jān is thus a later prefix, but its core is ultimately the -an (breath, life) from prehistory. We might also note Latin genius (originally a guardian spirit assigned at birth) and its later cousin “genie”, which via French comes from Arabic jinn. Latin genius is from PIE gen- “beget, produce,” implying an innate spirit that gives one life at birth. Though a different root, it shows Indo-European’s tendency to associate life origin with a spirit. Overall, Indo-European languages preserve the ancient theme: the soul as something akin to a breath or birth-given life-force – plausibly a legacy of our proto-word’s original meaning.
Afro-Asiatic: In the Afro-Asiatic family, the words for soul/spirit do not obviously sound like *ŋan, yet there are tantalizing parallels. Ancient Egyptian had multiple soul concepts: notably the kꜣ (ka) and the bꜣ (ba). The ka was the vital essence or life-force of a person, often depicted as a second figure or “double” of the person, and written with uplifted arms. It was considered a “protecting divine spirit” that “survived the death of the body”. The word ka is short, but in our framework one might wonder if an earlier form could have been longer (perhaps kan?). Similarly, the famous Egyptian symbol ankh (☥) literally stands for the word ʿnḫ, meaning “life”. The hieroglyphic spelling is Ꜥ-N-Ḫ – notably containing an -n- – and was used in words related to life and living. While we cannot directly link Egyptian ankh or ka to ŋan, it is striking that Egyptian words for life/soul are built from similar basic sounds (k, n, h) and also focus on the life-force concept. In the Semitic branch of Afro-Asiatic, the prevalent root for spirit is rūḥ (Arabic) or ruach (Hebrew), meaning wind, breath. Another is nefesh (Hebrew nephesh “soul/breath”). These have different sounds, yet the breath=spirit idea is again present. Intriguingly, Arabic jinn (plural jinnī or jān; source of English “genie”) refers to invisible spirit beings. Jinn comes from an Arabic root J-N-N meaning “to hide/conceal,” not from ŋan. But the phonetic overlap (the jin sound) and the semantic domain (spirit) add another layer of cross-language echo: an ancient listener might hear jinn and jing and sense a resonance. In sum, Afro-Asiatic languages reinforce the conceptual continuity – souls as breath or life or hidden beings – and offer forms (ka, ankh, jinn) that faintly mirror the proposed proto-word in either sound or sense.
Sino-Tibetan and East Asia: Sino-Tibetan languages provide some of the clearest instances of a jing-like sound connected to spirit. Classical Chinese divides the soul into multiple parts (e.g. hún 魂 and pò 魄), but also speaks of jīng 精, qì 氣, and shén 神 – the Essence, Vital Energy, and Spirit, known as the “Three Treasures” in Daoist thought. Jīng, pronounced like ching, means “essence” – the concentrated life-force, such as the reproductive essence, associated with vitality and growth. This jing is conceptually very close to our proto animating essence. Phonologically, Chinese jīng (Old Chinese tsəŋ) does not descend from a root akin to *ŋan as far as scholars can tell; it’s a native Chinese word meaning “refined, excellent” that came to denote essence. Yet the coincidence is hard to ignore: jing 精 and its Sino-xenic variants (e.g. Japanese sei, Vietnamese tinh) put an -ng nasal at the end of a term for vital essence. Meanwhile, Chinese hún 魂 “soul” (the yang soul that ascends) has an ancient pronunciation like ɡwən or χwən, which might reflect a earlier kwən or gʷən. This invites comparison to a proto *kan/ŋan. In fact, scholars have compared Chinese hún to the Tai word khwǎn (Thai khwan “soul”) and found they may be historically related. Proto-Tai is reconstructed as *xwənA for “soul” – essentially hwan – very close to Old Chinese hun. If Chinese hun/khun ultimately traces back to a foreign loan or wanderwort, one might speculate an origin in a word like *hun ~ *gun. Regardless, East Asia shows multiple echoes: a jing (essence), a hun/khwan (soul) – both carrying the notion of a vital spirit. Even outside Sino-Tibetan, East Asian cultures have similar-sounding terms: for example, Japanese kami (spirit, deity) is different in sound but the Ainu people of Japan speak of ramat for the soul, and some Austroasiatic languages in China have spirit-words like kan or khwan. These may be coincidences, but they paint a tantalizing picture of an East Asian spiritual lexicon that faintly rhymes with our proposed proto-word.
Austronesian and Austroasiatic: The Austronesian family (spread from Taiwan through Southeast Asia into the Pacific) retains a reconstructed term (q)anitu meaning “spirit of the dead, ghost”. This Proto-Austronesian word (*qaNiCu in one notation) yields forms like anito (ancestral spirit in Filipino languages), hantu (ghost in Malay/Indonesian), and anti/hanidu in Oceania. The root is qan(it)u, where we clearly see qan-, remarkably close to *kan/*ŋan. It refers to the soul of a deceased or a spirit haunting the living. Similarly, in Austroasiatic languages (e.g. Khmer, Vietnamese, etc.), words for spirit vary, but many Mon-Khmer languages use terms derived from klŭən or prən for soul. Notably, Khmer prálɨŋ (modern prùng) means soul, originally “life” (related to a word for to live) – not kan, but again the notion of life = soul. In the Hmong-Mien languages (adjacent to Sino-Tibetan), the word plig (pronounced bling) means the soul (especially the kind that can wander), which is interestingly similar to Chinese ling 靈 (灵, spirit). While Austronesian qanitu might be a better candidate for a distant cousin of *ŋan (if we hypothesize a deep linguistic linkage), even here the concept is consistent: a spirit or soul associated with life and death, named with a short, often nasal-terminated syllable.
Indigenous Americas: Many indigenous languages also encode the life-force concept in comparable terms, which could hint at very ancient inheritance or parallel development. In numerous Native American cultures, the word for spirit often connects to breath or wind. For example, the Lakota (Sioux) use wakhán or wakan to mean “sacred, mysterious, imbued with spirit.” Every object has a spirit that is wakan. The term Wakan Tanka literally “Great Mystery” is commonly translated “Great Spirit” – here wakan carries the sense of an indefinable holy power that animates all things. Intriguingly, wakan is analyzable as wa + kan in Lakota, where wa- is a prefix for “something” and -kan may mean “wonderful, incomprehensible” – an internal development. But the presence of kan meaning sacred power is evocative. In Algonquian languages, the term manitou (or manito) means a spirit or supernatural force (as in Gitche Manitou, Great Spirit). Manitou resembles Austronesian mana (the Polynesian term for spiritual power), though this is generally attributed to coincidence or at most very broad diffusion of a conceptual metaphor. Still, mana/manitou show a global recurrence of an m-n root for spiritual power – possibly related conceptually to our *ŋan (if the labial m was a later addition or alternation). In Mesoamerica, the Mayan languages used words like pixan (Yucatec Maya for “soul”, literally “something invisible”) and ch’ulel (Tzotzil Maya, the life force), while the Nahuatl (Aztec) word tonalli denoted a kind of animating spirit associated with the day-sun and located in one’s head. These words don’t sound like ŋan, but they tie soul to life and heat, much as breath or essence does. In the Andes, Quechua has samay for “breath; life-force” and aya for “spirit of dead; corpse”. The universality of the breath-soul linkage in the Americas (despite the phonetic differences) underscores that the conceptual continuity reaches even these distant groups – potentially because the concept and its original name were carried by the first humans who dispersed into the Americas. It’s speculative, but one can imagine that an Upper Paleolithic hunter in Siberia or Beringia spoke of the ŋan that leaves a body upon death, and that idea traveled with a name attached.
Other Families and Isolates: In Dravidian India, the traditional word for soul is exemplified by Tamil uyir (உயிர்) meaning “life, soul, breath”. It’s unrelated phonetically to *ŋan, but notably overlaps in meaning (again equating life and breath). Dravidian languages largely adopted Indo-Aryan spiritual vocabulary (like atma from Sanskrit ātman), so any deeper traces of a proto-*ŋan might have been lost or merged. In Uralic languages, a different root appears: e.g., Finnish henki and Hungarian lélek mean spirit/breath, from Proto-Uralic lewle “breath, soul”. This is a separate lineage (no nasal consonant, rather an L), showing that not all families preserved the same proto-word. Yet interestingly, Finnish löyly (steam, spirit of sauna) and Hungarian lélegzik (to breathe) echo the breath-soul link strongly. As an isolate example, Sumerian in Mesopotamia (with no known relatives) had ZI meaning “life, breath, spirit”, which corresponded to Akkadian napishtum (breath, soul). Sumerian zi (sometimes transliterated zig) is short and ends in a vowel, not obviously like *ŋan, but we might compare it to a scenario where the initial consonant is dropped (*ŋan > an or *zan > zi). Sumerian also had the word gidim for “ghost.” In Basque (another isolate in Europe), the word arima “soul” is used, but it’s suspected to be a borrowing from Latin anima. Even if not inherited, Basque arima shows how compelling the Latin/PIE anima/anima was – it spread its “an” sound into Basque conceptualization of the soul. Across the African continent, aside from Afro-Asiatic, Niger-Congo languages have diverse words: e.g., Yoruba emi “spirit, breath”, Zulu umoya “spirit (wind)” – again the breath idea. In West Africa, the Mande peoples speak of nyama as a “vital force” pervading living things. Nyama is interestingly close to nama, and contains an -ma nasal ending. While no proven linguistic connection exists to *ŋan, the idea of a named vital force called nyama resonates with the jing hypothesis that an ancient word might lie beneath.

Egyptian ankh – the “key of life” – used in hieroglyphs to denote the word “life”. This ancient symbol exemplifies the concept of a vital essence or soul that persists beyond the body. Many cultures’ symbols and words for the life-force (breath, spirit, or soul) may trace back to a common origin in our deep past.

New Parallels in Indigenous, Creole, and Isolate Languages#

Beyond the well-studied families, we find additional parallels that bolster the idea of a deep-time spiritual word. In some cases these may be recent borrowings or coincidental, but they are thought-provoking:

Indigenous Australian: In the Noongar language of Australia, Waugal (or waug) refers to a spirit or soul, literally meaning the sacred serpent deity but also associated with the breath of life. Although phonetically different, the concept of breath-soul appears even here. Another Aboriginal term, kanyini (Pitjantjatjara), denotes a principle of connectedness that has spiritual undertones, and intriguingly starts with kan-, though its meaning (“responsibility, care”) is more societal now.
Creoles and Mixed Languages: Most creole languages (e.g. Haitian Creole, Tok Pisin, etc.) have words for soul derived from their parent languages (French âme, English soul, etc.). However, their retention of the concept underscores its importance. A curious note is that in some Caribbean folklore (a mix of African and European beliefs), the term “duppy” (ghost) is used alongside soul, but those words don’t trace to our proto-root. One might look instead at Spiritist creole chants or voudon words of West African origin, where words like lanmò (from French la mort, death) or nanan (ancestor spirit) appear. These n and m sounds recall the widespread nasal pattern for spirit terms, albeit these are products of syncretic religion, not deep time.
Isolates and Minor Families: We already noted Basque arima (likely from Latin). Another isolate, Burushaski in Central Asia, uses hílsamas for soul (unrelated). The Hadza of Tanzania (isolate) call the soul epi, and the Sandawe (isolate) use hu’o. These vary widely, suggesting that if *ŋan was ever present in those lineages, it has been lost or replaced. Interestingly, some Caucasian languages have words like ts’anya (in Georgian, ts’ame means life) and Kartvelian languages use suli (soul, originally “wind”). We do find a Nakh-Dagestanian word ruh (in Avar) for soul, possibly a loan from Arabic. This reminds us how later religious and cultural exchanges (e.g. Arabic ruh, Latin spiritus) often spread new soul-words that obscured whatever deep-rooted term might have existed.
Overlooked Parallels: A parallel sometimes overlooked is the commonality of sound and concept across completely unrelated cultures. For instance, the Polynesian concept of mana (spiritual power) and the North American Manitou both not only share a similar sound but describe a similar impersonal spiritual force. Scholars attribute this to coincidence or at best a universal in human culture, not a linguistic cognate. But in the spirit of the jing hypothesis, one might ask: could mana/manitou be distant offshoots or refractions of our proto *ŋan? If *ŋan originally meant the undifferentiated vital power, perhaps in some branches an initial m developed (from a humming nasal or as a determinative prefix) yielding m-ŋan or man. Over tens of millennia and thousands of miles, man(a) could emerge independently in Polynesia and Algonquia as the name for the universal life-force. It’s a speculative leap – mainstream linguists would require much stronger evidence. Nonetheless, seeing mana in Oceania and manitou in America contributing to spiritual vocabulary fuels the idea of ancient convergence.

In summary, while many of these indigenous and isolate examples do not directly preserve a gen/jin/jing sound, they reinforce the conceptual scaffolding on which the jing hypothesis rests: nearly all human cultures have a notion of a soul/spirit, often tied to breath or vital force, and they frequently assign it a short, powerful name – quite often containing resonant nasals or velar sounds that could be faint echoes of a single Stone Age word.

Reconstructing *ŋan: Phonetic and Semantic Rationale#

Bringing the strands together, we propose reconstructing the proto-word as ŋán (with a rising tone or stress on the vowel, if one imagines it), meaning “animating life-force, breath-soul.” The choice of ŋ (the ng sound) is motivated by the observation that many global terms for soul either begin with a velar sound (k/g/kh) or have an nasal quality (n/m/ng) – ŋ neatly combines both features. The vowel a is chosen for its ubiquity and stability in root words; a often survives sound change or leaves traces (as seen in Latin anima, Persian jan, Thai khwan, etc.). The final -n represents the nasal ending that we see in so many of the examples above (from 精 jīng to jān to khwan). By including it, we acknowledge the likelihood that the proto-word ended in a nasal sound that symbolically might have imitated a humming breath or a moan – fitting for a concept so mystical.

Semantically, *ŋan would encompass the overlapping ideas of breath, life, spirit, and unseen power. Early humans would have observed that breath separates the living from the dead; the moment the ŋan departs, a being is lifeless. Hence ŋan could also imply “departed one” (spirit/ghost) or “life within” (soul/essence). This multilayered meaning is reflected in later languages: e.g., Sumerian zi was both breath and soul, Egyptian ankh was life in this world and the next, and Latin spiritus meant breath, soul, and ghost by turns. The proto-word’s adaptability made it survive: different daughter languages emphasized the facet most relevant to their culture (breath, ghost, strength, etc.), but the root idea stayed intact.

Phonetically, *ŋan would have been easy to pronounce and hard to confuse with other basic words. The velar nasal ŋ does not begin many common words (in English, for example, ŋ never starts a native word, though in some languages it can). This distinctness could help a sacred or abstract term like *ŋan stand out. Also, the nasal vowel sequence may have given it a sonorous, chant-like quality – one can imagine a prehistoric shaman calling back a lost ŋan to a sick body, or mourning the ŋan that has flown away from a deceased tribesman, the sound “ngan… ngan…” echoing in a ritual. The iconicity of the sound (a nasal, sighing breath) with the meaning (breath-soul itself) might have solidified its place in the protolanguage.

Likely Pathways of Global Spread#

How could *ŋan have spread widely enough to leave traces in tongues separated by vast oceans and millennia? Linguists recognize that by 15,000 years ago (circa 13,000 BCE), humanity’s languages had already diversified; there was no single tongue at that time, but there might have been large families (perhaps “Proto-Eurasiatic” or “Borean”) whose branches reach many modern groups. If *ŋan was a word in such a proto-family (for instance, perhaps in a Proto-Borean lexicon, the hypothetical ancestor of Afro-Asiatic, Indo-European, Dravidian, etc.), it could have been inherited as those macro-families broke up. Another possibility is ancient diffusion: the concept of an animating spirit was so fundamental that even neighboring groups with different languages borrowed the convenient term from each other. Stone Age people did interact over long distances; ethnographers of later periods noted trade routes and inter-cultural exchanges of religious ideas. A word like *ŋan might have been part of a shamanic vocabulary that spread with spiritual practices. For example, Austronesian qanitu could have been borrowed into Austroasiatic or Tai-Kadai languages at a very early date, or vice versa. The similarity of Chinese hun and Tai khwan suggests some ancient borrowing or common inheritance in the Asian Bronze Age. Likewise, one could imagine that the concept of mana in Oceania and manitou in North America did not independently converge by pure chance, but perhaps had a distant link via the Bering Strait or trans-Pacific diffusion (there are contentious theories of pre-Columbian trans-oceanic contact that might support this, though none widely accepted).

In more recent times, major religions and cultures carried their soul-words across continents – Latin anima with Christianity, Arabic ruh and jinn with Islam, Sanskrit atma and prana with Buddhism and Hinduism, etc. These often overwrote the indigenous terms or merged with them. For instance, many African and Native American languages now use a loan like espíritu or moya (from Swahili roho or Arabic ruh) due to missionary influence. Such overlays make the reconstruction work harder, as the original term might be lost or preserved only in folklore. The Jing hypothesis tries to peel back these later layers and find the primal root underneath. It treats patterns like K-N for “sacred” in Siouan (wakan), H-N for “soul” in East Asia (hun, khwan), ʔ-N-ḫ for “life” in Egypt (ankh), and *-N syllables for “soul” in PIE (anima, etc.) as more than coincidence. The pathways might have been: Proto-*ŋan > early Eurasian dialects (approx. 12k BCE) > dispersal with migrating human groups, then retention of the root in each region’s most culturally salient spiritual term. Some areas kept it as the word for life/breath (Europe, Persia, India), others as soul/ghost (China, Southeast Asia), others as sacred or powerful (Americas, Oceania). Over time, languages trimmed or added to the word – but a core N or NG sound plus a vowel often remains as a fossil.

Of course, we must acknowledge that proving a single origin for these words is extremely difficult. Sound changes over 15,000 years are so immense that direct derivation is obscured; what we are observing could well be independent development harnessing common human sound symbolism (perhaps nasal sounds felt “spiritual” in many cultures). Critics point out that humans everywhere experience breath and death, so it’s natural many languages coined similar words (short, nasal, open vowels) for the concept of soul without any genetic relation. The jing hypothesis is admittedly an extreme application of the comparative method, stretching it to the limits of time depth. However, by assembling these cross-linguistic echoes and examining their phonetic and semantic alignments, we can at least appreciate how strikingly recurrent the pattern is.

Conclusion: A Deep Echo in Humanity’s Spiritual Vocabulary#

From jīng to jān, khwan to ka, anima to ankh, and wakan to mana, we see a recurring symbolic shape: a word that often has an “an” or “en” sound, often prefixed or suffixed with a resonant consonant, carrying the meaning of life’s mysterious essence. This could be a case of what linguist Morris Swadesh called “mega-Correspondences” – pervasive similarities across languages due to either ancient inheritance or universal trends. Our reconstructed proto-word ŋan is an attempt to capture this linguistic ghost in the data. It represents, in one syllable, the idea that life is a breath and that breath is spirit. Whether or not all the examples cited truly descend from one Ur-language, the exercise reveals an undeniable conceptual continuity over time: humans have always needed a word for the immortal part of us, the unseen force that leaves when we die and perhaps carries on. It is poetic to think that this word itself might have carried on, in altered form, for eons – a kind of fossil of the human spirit embedded in our languages.

In speculative deep reconstruction, we treat the globe’s tongues like a vast palimpsest. Under the diverse scripts written by history, there are faint strokes of a common proto-text. The Jing hypothesis posits that within words for soul and spirit, one can discern such a shared early proto-word. While definitive proof remains elusive (and many linguists would caution against lumping so many families together), the phonosemantic clustering we’ve reviewed gives the idea a measure of credibility. At the very least, it highlights how certain sounds and meanings cluster across cultures: a nasal, a breathy or velar onset, a notion of vital essence. This could be due to that primeval term *ŋan echoing through the halls of prehistory, or because the nature of the concept itself urges people, again and again, to find the same kinds of sounds apt for expressing it.

In the end, the reconstructed form ŋan for “soul/spirit” stands as a fascinating hypothesis – a reminder that language, like DNA, carries traces of our remote ancestors’ ways of understanding the world. The next time we encounter words like essence, energy, spirit, ghost, life, breath, in any language, we might listen for a distant echo of ŋan, the heartbeat of language that has perhaps been repeating for 15,000 years.

Sources: The comparative analysis above is informed by linguistic research and cross-cultural data: Indo-European roots for breath/soul, Chinese and Thai terms for soul, Persian jān, Egyptian ankh and ka, Sumerian zi, Mande nyama, and numerous other examples as cited throughout. These sources illustrate the breadth of evidence used to triangulate the possible existence of a deep proto-word for the soul. Each citation corresponds to the specific example or fact mentioned, supporting the speculative reconstruction with attested linguistic data.