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Guy Courchesne
Joined: 10 Mar 2003
Posts: 9650
Location: Mexico City
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 Posted: Sat Aug 25, 2012 1:55 am Post subject: 'Oldest English words' identified |
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http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7911645.stm
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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.
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It takes guts to take a stick to English to squeeze the bad out... |
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voltaire
Joined: 03 Dec 2006
Posts: 179
Location: 'The secret of being boring is to say everything.'
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| Posted: Tue Aug 28, 2012 4:38 am Post subject: |
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| We, I - the two or three of us must have the guts to stick to maintaining the squeeze on the so-called bad words. |
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GambateBingBangBOOM
Joined: 04 Nov 2003
Posts: 2021
Location: Japan
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| Posted: Tue Aug 28, 2012 11:22 am Post subject: Re: 'Oldest English words' identified |
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| Guy Courchesne wrote: |
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7911645.stm
| Quote: |
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.
... |
It takes guts to take a stick to English to squeeze the bad out... |
Interesting. Their computer found words in English that date back tens of thousands of years, and yet
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| The term Anglo-Saxon is used by some historians to designate the Germanic tribes who invaded and settled the south and east of Britain beginning in the early 5th century and the period from their creation of the English nation up to the Norman conquest. The Anglo-Saxon era denotes the period of English history between about 550 and 1066.[1][2] The term is also used for the language, now known as Old English, that was spoken and written by the Anglo-Saxons and their descendants in England (and part of southeastern Scotland) between at least the mid-5th century and the mid-12th century.[3] |
So if they found words tens of thousands of years, then wouldn't that suggest that those are Proto-Germanic and not 'English' (which would still be odd, considering how musch closer the numbers in North Germanic languages are to German numbers than they are to English numbers- which suggests that the common anscester is closer toGerman than to English- not exactly a wild idea) or maybe even Proto-Indo-European. |
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smithrn1983
Joined: 23 Jul 2010
Posts: 320
Location: Moscow
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| Posted: Tue Aug 28, 2012 6:18 pm Post subject: Re: 'Oldest English words' identified |
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| GambateBingBangBOOM wrote: |
So if they found words tens of thousands of years, then wouldn't that suggest that those are Proto-Germanic and not 'English' (which would still be odd, considering how musch closer the numbers in North Germanic languages are to German numbers than they are to English numbers- which suggests that the common anscester is closer toGerman than to English- not exactly a wild idea) or maybe even Proto-Indo-European. |
Proto-Indo-European would be the correct guess. Similar consonant clusters appear in those numbers in slavic language counting as well. The connection was known to linguists long before this study was published. The same study also came to the conclusion that Proto-Indo-European dates back 9000 years, so they are, in fact, saying that these words are older, even, than the earliest proto-language to which English can be linked. I'm curious to see if these findings will be accepted, since the most popular hypothesis for PIE is that it was spoken 5000 years ago.
I think what the authors of the article meant to say was that these were the oldest words in the English language. Determining what the oldest English words are would be quite a different task. |
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