'Oldest English Words' Identified

BBC ^ | Thursday, 26 February 2009

[muawiyah]

Try Ladino and Mingo. There are self-instruction sites on the internet. Both are fun. Maimomnedies spoke the first and Hiawatha spoke the latter.

You could do worse!

[bigheadfred]

You could do worse!

Igpay Atinlay? :-)

[ZULU]

Thanks.

I’ll look into it.

[null and void]

Bullshit. "Freedom", "liberty", "capitalism", and "individual" are more likely to die.

Die? Nope. Be murdered, more likely.

(And the word 'capitalism' will have a looooong life. It will be uses as a linguistic boogieman, filling the role that has been filled by words like commie, nazi, racist, etc)...

[Lonesome in Massachussets]

I thought it odd that bad was in jeopardy.

C. S. Lewis identified a process he called verbicide. Words begin to loose precise and distinct meanings with time and after a while become more or less synonyms for “good” and “bad”. I suspect that the adjective “bad”, which often is used ironically to mean “provocative” will be replaced by the adjective “Democratic” within a couple of generations.

A couple of other interesting cases are “special”, which, thanks to “special education” has come to be a synonym among school age children for “retarded”.

Also interesting is “gay” which has lost its older meaning of light and carefree and come to mean “embittered superannuated faggot”. Among school children, all kidding aside, gay seems to mean “corny” or “effete”.

[Lonesome in Massachussets]

Which word is closely related to the words kin, kind, king, queen and through common Indo-european roots to gentle, gentry, gentile, inter alia.

[Lonesome in Massachussets]

Sounds like a cunning linguist to me.