Applied Languages

    Posted by Jaiken Struck on February 27th, 2009

The oldest words in any language are among the most basic and profound words we know, according to new research from Britain.

As one might expect with humans, “I” is first among them. So is “who,” as well as the numbers “two,” “three” and “five,” which date back approximately 10,000 years to a time when humans were just moving beyond a primitive hunting and gathering existence. The number “one,” which seems so essential to everyday speech, actually evolved more recently than the others, according to Mark Pagel, an evolutionary language scientist at Reading University.

He used sophisticated computer modelling to study the transformation of vocabulary in the Indo-European language group, which includes most of the languages spoken across Europe, the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent.

The research was done using an IBM supercomputer that matched the words in various languages with the time period of their use. Many words with similar meanings in different languages share common sounds, such as the word water in English, wasser in German and vaten in Swedish. Using that kind of information as a starting point, they were able to trace words back to common roots and map their evolution.

The study predicts that certain words are likely to disappear in time, just as they have been doing for thousands of years. “Fifty per cent of the words we use today would be unrecognizable to our ancestors living 2,500 years ago,” he said.

He predicts that “dirty” is the word most likely to be scrubbed from the English language in the next 750 years. “It has been replaced throughout the history of Indo-European languages by other words that mean the same thing at a higher rate than any other word. We can predict that in the future that word will be replaced by some other word,” he told the BBC.

Words that are seldom used are the ones most threatened by extinction, he said. “The frequency with which some words are used in our everyday speech is a strong predictor of whether they’ll be retained. Words we use a lot tend to be highly conserved,” Prof. Pagel said.

Numerals change only slowly, followed by pronouns, nouns, verbs, adjectives and conjunctions, which are the most volatile. Words such as “and” or “but” evolve 100 times more quickly than numerals, according to the study.

Read more: The Globe and Mail

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