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. The researchers used the university’s IBM supercomputer to track the known relations between words, in order to develop estimates of how long ago a given ancestral word diverged in two different languages. They have integrated that into an algorithm that will produce a list of words relevant to a given date. “You type in a date in the past or in the future and it will give you a list of words that would have changed going back in time or will change going into the future,” Professor Pagel told BBC News. “From that list you can derive a phrasebook of words you could use if you tried to show up and talk to, for example, William the Conqueror.” That is, the model provides a list of words that are unlikely to have changed from their common ancestral root by the time of William the Conqueror. Words that have not diverged since then would comprise similar sounds to their modern descendants, whose meanings would therefore probably be recognisable on sound alone. However, the model cannot offer a guess as to what the ancestral words were. It can only estimate the likelihood that the sound from a modern English word might make some sense if called out during the Battle of Hastings. Dirty business What the researchers found was that the frequency with which a word is used relates to how slowly it changes through time, so that the most common words tend to be the oldest ones. For example, the words “I” and “who” are among the oldest, along with the words “two”, “three”, and “five”. The word “one” is only slightly younger.
The word “four” experienced a linguistic evolutionary leap that makes it significantly younger in English and different from other Indo-European languages. Meanwhile, the fastest-changing words are projected to die out and be replaced by other words much sooner. For example, “dirty” is a rapidly changing word; currently there are 46 different ways of saying it in the Indo-European languages, all words that are unrelated to each other. As a result, it is likely to die out soon in English, along with “stick” and “guts”.
Verbs also tend to change quite quickly, so “push”, “turn”, “wipe” and “stab” appear to be heading for the lexicographer’s chopping block. Again, the model cannot predict what words may change to; those linguistic changes are according to Professor Pagel “anybody’s guess”. High fidelity “We think some of these words are as ancient as 40,000 years old. The sound used to make those words would have been used by all speakers of the Indo-European languages throughout history,” Professor Pagel said. “Here’s a sound that has been connected to a meaning – and it’s a mostly arbitrary connection – yet that sound has persisted for those tens of thousands of years.” The work casts an interesting light on the connection between concepts and language in the human brain, and provides an insight into the evolution of a dynamic set of words. “If you’ve ever played ‘Chinese whispers’, what comes out the end is usually gibberish, and more or less when we speak to each other we’re playing this massive game of Chinese whispers. Yet our language can somehow retain its fidelity.” __________ Full article: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7911645.stm Photo: BBC News |
||
__________
A handy little guide to small talk in the Stone Age
A “time traveller’s phrasebook” that could allow basic communication between modern English speakers and Stone Age cavemen is being compiled by scientists studying the evolution of language.
Research has identified a handful of modern words that have changed so little in tens of thousands of years that ancient hunter-gatherers would probably have been able to understand them.
Anybody who was catapulted back in time to Ice Age Europe would stand a good chance of being intelligible to the locals by using words such as “I”, “who” and “thou” and the numbers “two”, “three” and “five”, the work suggests.
More nuanced conversation would be more of a challenge. The analysis of language evolution suggests that none of the adjectives, verbs and nouns used in modern languages would have much in common with those used then.
Mark Pagel, of the University of Reading, who leads the research, said that it was nonetheless becoming possible to create a rudimentary Stone Age phrasebook made up of the oldest known words.
“If a time traveller wanted to go back in time to a specific date, we could probably draw up a little phrasebook of the modern words that are likely to have sounded similar back then,” he told The Times. “You wouldn’t be able to discuss anything very complicated, but it might be enough to get you out of a tight spot.”
Dr Pagel’s research also predicts which parts of modern vocabulary are likely to survive into English as it will be spoken 1,000 years in the future, and which will die out.
By the year 3000, words such as “throw”, “stick”, “dirty”, “guts” and “squeeze” could easily be gone. These already differ greatly between related languages, such as English and German, and are good candidates to evolve into new forms.
Dr Pagel has tracked how words have changed by comparing languages from the Indo-European family, which includes most of the past and present languages of Europe, the Middle East and the Indian sub-continent. All are derived from the same root and have many linguistic similarities.
The word “water”, for example, is wasser in German, eau in French and aqua in Italian and Latin. Although each is slightly different, they share a similar sound that shows them to share a common linguistic ancestor.
By comparing these languages, it is possible to work out how and when they diverged, and to trace the evolutionary history of individual words.
Dr Pagel has recently been able to track the evolutionary history of Indo-European back almost 30,000 years, using a new IBM supercomputer. He said that some of the oldest words were well over 10,000 years old.
As the original Indo-European language is thought to date back no more than 9,000 years, Dr Pagel believes that some of the longest-lived words have an even more venerable history. “I can say with confidence that there are sounds or words that predate Indo-European,” he said. “If you look at ‘thou’, ‘I’ and ‘who’, we can now tell they are probably at least 15,000 to 20,000 years old. The sounds used then for these meanings were probably very similar to those used today.”
Dr Pagel’s work has shown that the pace at which words evolved depends on how they are used. Numerals are the slowest to change, followed by pronouns, probably because they are used extremely often and have a very precise and important meaning.
These words are highly resistant to evolution, in the same way as important genes look similar across many different species because mutations cause a damaging loss of functionality. “Just as we have highly conserved genes, we have highly conserved words,” Dr Pagel said. “Language shows a truly remarkable fidelity.”
Nouns evolve more slowly than verbs, and verbs evolve more slowly than adjectives. Words that are used less frequently evolve more quickly than those that are common.
The website http://www.evolution. reading.ac.uk/WordChanges/ shows whether particular modern English words are likely to be similar or different for any date in the past or future.
A continuing evolution
The oldest words, resistant to evolution
I, Who, We, Thou, Two, Three and Five
Words that are evolving rapidly, and likely to disappear
Dirty, squeeze, bad, because, guts, push (verb), smell (verb), stab, stick (noun), turn (verb), wipe
__________
Full article: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/science/article5805522.ece
