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 ...
You could do worse!
Igpay Atinlay? :-)
Thanks.
I’ll look into it.
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)...
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”.
Which word is closely related to the words kin, kind, king, queen and through common Indo-european roots to gentle, gentry, gentile, inter alia.
Sounds like a cunning linguist to me.
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