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 ...
“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.
Evolve? Aren’t intelligently designed?
bttt
Aww Geeze, another computer model....
Garbage in, garbage out.
There is really no way to know if they are correct in some cases, like this one.
"You're not the boss of me"
:)
At the same time it changes. These guys want you to accept the idea that "evolve" and "change" mean exactly the same thing ~ which they don't.
Ungood?
Huh?
I bet I know some other old English words that aren’t being reported having to do with bodily functions. Does Chaucer come to mind?
Then it morphed to "dad"...
Dad and son went fishing...brought the fish home and told wife..."dead"
And wifey said....."Duh".
The great circle of life!!
Nice, “Your not the boss of me”, I could think of a few others, but decorum and posting rules prohibit such language. Aside from all that it is good to know that we Americans aren’t the only ones that waste tax money on “not absolutly, but gosh darn close” useless studies.
“”I”, “we”, “two” and “three””
It sounds like sex talk to me.
Yeah, if those are the predicted first to go, then the computer model must be doing double duty as a climate change predictor. Equally flawed results.
And BTW, all mathematical and logical explanations for language change miss the mark. Whim and whimsy are much more likely.
Don’t be so judgmental. “Bad” is simply “differently good.”
That was my first thought, too. Then I thought of a really old anglo-saxon word beginning with F and applied it directly to the computer model-makers.
I’m pretty sure that the words these people would like to see become extinct are “God”, “gun”, “freedom”, “liberty” and “private”.
So, the Clovis people spoke early English?
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