'Oldest English words' identified

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7911645.stm

by ilamont • 17 years ago

64 41 17 years ago

news.bbc.co.uk

tocomment• 17 years ago

I'm curious how the advent of the printing press, widespread written language affected the speed of language change? My guess would be that fixing words to text would slow it significantly. Anyone know of any studies on that?

Another thing I'm curious about is what the world's first language was like. Would it have been spoken by cavemen, would it have been simpler? What would be missing, future tense, abstract concepts we take for granted? What if you go back further? Did some of our words come from non-human ancestors?

markessien8• 17 years ago

I believe that widespread writing is responsible for a lot of the grammatical complexity of European languages. Most languages that were not widely written, or that did not have a central source for correct writing, tend to have simple Grammer, but the cultures that wrote a lot tend to have very complex grammar. This is just my personal observation.

The creole and pidgin languages are what happen when you strip English or French of the artificial complexity imposed by layers of centralized rules.

compay• 17 years ago

Writing has no effect on the "complexity" of the grammar. Language is almost always acquired by children in the absence of writing; a 4-5 year old who is just starting to read already fully understands almost 100% of the language's grammar and going forward will mostly only acquire vocabulary.

Now, whether writing slows down the course of language change is an open (and interesting) topic.

The stereotype that Western languages like Latin and Russian are "complex" because they have things like case systems is a curious ethnocentrism of English speakers. If you dig deep enough all languages are phenomenally complex.

wozer2• 17 years ago

Proto-Germanic (the common ancestor of English, German, Scandinavian etc.) was hardly ever written, but its reconstructed grammar is quite complex. Similarly complex as today's Icelandic.

Now I don't know much about this reconstruction process and how error-prone it is. But it's the best we can do for non-written languages of the past.

I don't know anything about the complexity of contemporary non-written languages.

cchooper• 17 years ago

Creole and pidgin languages are special cases though. They are simple because they are relatively new constructions, rather than because they are unwritten.

halo• 17 years ago

I think use in formal writing slows it down most; the biggest changes from other Germanic languages such as loss of gender for nouns happened when English was a peasant language used under the French-speaking Norman aristocracy.

katz• 17 years ago

" Would it have been spoken by cavemen, would it have been simpler? What would be missing, future tense, abstract concepts we take for granted?"

The caveman language you describe look a lot like the language used by modern day teens.

tontoa4• 17 years ago

From the article

Oldest words: I, We, Two, Three

Words likely to become extinct first: Squeeze, Guts, Stick, and Bad

ardit33• 17 years ago

The article is much more than that. Actually what are the actual words is not the main point. Please let people read it. These two linner summaries are like somebody spoiling a movie by saying "the killer is John, and he kills himself at the end". Poof, no mater how good the movie is, you just took out some of the fun.

Unless the article was too long and really not worth reading at all, please avoid these shallow summaries.

kubrick2• 17 years ago

I love that this board is intellectually curious enough to vote up articles like this. (I'm a word wonk, so this is especially interesting to me.)

FWIW: If anyone is interested in the history of language and how we got to talking this way, I'd suggest you check out John McWhorter's lectures from The Teaching Company (teach12.com).

yan• 17 years ago

+1 for recommending McWhorter's video course from TTC. It's excellent material and he teaches it very well.

For those that are interested, McWhorter's non-linguistic books are also worth a look, he also writes about race relations.

Edit: A major point I took away from his course is to not be opposed new words or other dialects of seemingly "less educated" nature. He talks about language as a dynamic, living entity and not something rigidly defined by a dictionary. He argues rather well that it's just part of the natural growth and mutation of language and should not be looked down on.

davidw3• 17 years ago

I recently read his book, "Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue", and while it was a little bit unbalanced (he spends far too long dwelling on certain points), I really enjoyed it.

biohacker422• 17 years ago

I'm guessing most of the English words can't be older then about 4th or 5th century, I think that's when the Anglons, Saxons and Jutes, came over from Germany.

Older words would have to be of Celtic origin, and would probably also occur in Welsh, Scottish and Irish.

Xichekolas2• 17 years ago

The words the Germans brought came from somewhere too. They didn't just create a new set when they moved to the British Isles.

Some of those words they brought over might still be around, and some of those really old words were surely already very old even in the 5th century.

biohacker422• 17 years ago

Right, so the older version of those words would be found in Germany.

wozer2• 17 years ago

>Some of those words they brought over might still be around

A lot of those word are still around (in one form or the other). For example at least those written in italics:

The words the Germans brought came from somewhere too. They didn't just create a new set when they moved to the British Isles.

"They" is of Scandinavian origin, by the way.

tokenadult2• 17 years ago

The article appears to be referring to Morris Swadesh's list of words

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swadesh_list

used for comparative language studies. Swadesh pioneered the study of glottochronology,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glottochronology

which is not an exact science, but suggestive of the kind of interesting patterns mentioned in the submitted article.

redder• 17 years ago

The article is quite confused. What they really mean, I think is "words that have reteained similar sound and meaning for the longest time period through the direct main lineage of English."

ja2ke• 17 years ago

One of my favorite weird old English things is "ye." It's interesting that the "y" in "ye" was originally not y but the Anglo-Saxon character "thorn" (þ). Thorn slowly devolved into "y" due to most offset printing typefaces coming from parts of Europe which didn't have the Thorn character in their language. I guess English typesetters decided that a stylized y looks closer to a stylized þ than anything else that they could come up with, and just went with it.

The funny thing though, is thorn is the deprecated character for a "th" sound.

So, "ye olde pub" is actually "þe olde pub," which is intended to be pronounced "the old pub" when you use Thorn properly.

We'd be confusing the hell out of someone from the middle ages by trying to say "ye old" at them and expecting them to understand it, because they'd be expecting us to just say "the."

(Not to be confused with "ye" meaning "you," which is I think more or less an accurate. It's "ye" as "the" which is weird, and reminiscent of discovering the old man in Logan's Run or something.)

Shamiq• 17 years ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorn_(letter)#Abbreviations

That's very interesting. I didn't believe it at first -- hence the link that starts this post.

xenophanes• 17 years ago

Why would the word 'bad' die out?

markessien8• 17 years ago

I believe it's because it's one of the words that has a great many variations in the pronunciation. Compare an Indian saying Bad to an American, to an Irish person to a South African.

jcl• 17 years ago

If I am reading the article correctly, they are predicting the death of "bad" not because different English-speakers pronounce it differently, but because there are few other languages using a word with the same meaning derived from the same root:

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.

herdrick• 17 years ago

Great topic, but the article is too hazy on how their model works and what data they are feeding it.

My fellow HNers, give us more like this. Except better.

sedm0784• 17 years ago

The linguists at Language Log don't think too highly of this article (and the BBC radio segment on the same topic):

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1186

Choice comment: "This is probably one of the most abysmal failures of science journalism ever."

'Oldest English words' identified

Related Stories