Posted on 02/26/2009 4:51:56 PM PST by nickcarraway
Some of the oldest words in English have been identified, scientists say.
Reading University researchers claim "I", "we", "two" and "three" are among the most ancient, dating back tens of thousands of years.
Their computer model analyses the rate of change of words in English and the languages that share a common heritage.
The team says it can predict which words are likely to become extinct - citing "squeeze", "guts", "stick" and "bad" as probable first casualties.
"We use a computer to fit a range of models that tell us how rapidly these words evolve," said Mark Pagel, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Reading.
"We fit a wide range, so there's a lot of computation involved; and that range then brackets what the true answer is and we can estimate the rates at which these things are replaced through time."
Sound and concept
Across the Indo-European languages - which include most of the languages spoken from Europe to the Asian subcontinent - the vocal sound made to express a given concept can be similar.
New words for a concept can arise in a given language, utilising different sounds, in turn giving a clue to a word's relative age in the language.
At the root of the Reading University effort is a lexicon of 200 words that is not specific to culture or technology, and is therefore likely to represent concepts that have not changed across nations or millennia.
"We have lists of words that linguists have produced for us that tell us if two words in related languages actually derive from a common ancestral word," said Professor Pagel.
"We have descriptions of the ways we think words change and their ability to change into other words, and those descriptions can be turned into a mathematical language," he added.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.bbc.co.uk ...
"the check is in the mail"
"it's not you; it's me"
"No, honey, that doesn't make you look fat"
:)
(thanks for your service!...my brother was commissioned in 1986...a lifer)
“A beard! A beard!!!”
NI!
No, it changes by natural selection. When was the last time you heard someone refer to something as groovy or gnarly? Words come and go and change as needed. Witness the number of nouns that have become verbs as well.
What's wrong with "stick" that it would go extinct?
It's a fine, useful noun and an even better verb.
Bullshit. "Freedom", "liberty", "capitalism", and "individual" are more likely to die.
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I thank thee, nickcarraway. |
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You’re wilcuma
Whoops.
Stone Age phrasebook developed by scientists studying oldest words
Telegraph | 25 Feb 2009 | Alastair Jamieson
Posted on 02/26/2009 8:52:45 AM PST by BGHater
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/2194604/posts
My main squeeze says I ain't got the guts to stick up the bodega, so I shot her. My bad.
This week. I love those words. They really annoy the kids! Although "gnarly" when not used to speak of wood, must always be followed by "dude". Proper grammer is important
The headline is silly.
“a lexicon of 200 words that is not specific to culture or technology”, meaning this isn’t about English but about Indo-European or something before that.
>>When was the last time you heard someone refer to something as groovy or gnarly?
Or “funky”? Or “rad”. Those words, are like, totally dead.
>>Proper grammer is important
Spelling, not so much. :)
EVOLVE means a word and languages change gradually with use from one language to another. Modern English evolved from Old English a.k.a Anglo-Saxon. If you read it (Anglo-Saxon), chances are you wouldn’t be able to understand it. It was a highly inflected language, like Latin,while very Germanic. With the addition of a sizable Norse population in the 800’s, 900’s and 1000’s the language “evolved” by dropping a lot of the inflections so it could be more easily understood by the Norse. With the later addition of Norman French speakers to the population a host of Latin words came into English and evolved from their Gallicized Norman forms into an Anglicized forms.
Ancient Egyptian “evolved” wiht time an use into Middle Egyptian and then later Coptic. Amn Egyptian of 2000 B.C. wouldn’t be likely to be able to understand much at all of Coptic.
Mycenean Greek “evolved” over time into Classical Greek, Koine and leter Modern Greek. A modern Greek speaker would have as much of a chance of undeerstanding a Classical Greek as would a modern day speaker of English have in understanding Anglo-Saxon.
This pattern is repeated with other languages and linguistic families.
Linguists and philologists know the probable changes in word sounds with time in different language groups and can reasonably predict with some degree of accuracy how words looked and sounded as they evolved. The computer modeling helps in this regard.
I much prefer Norman/Gallo.
You are a linguist?
“Bad” is oldspeak. I bellyfeel the use of “ungood”.
Yes, or goodness challenged.
No, a hobbyist.
Hmmm. So am I. I dable in Ancient Egyptian at times and took Classical GReek and Latin in College and High School - along with German and Spanish. I’m not fluent in any of them any more - long time ago and no practise.
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