Revealed: The world's oldest words.. and the ones that will disappear

Revealed: The world's oldest words.. and the ones that will disappear

By Niall Firth
Last updated at 3:13 PM on 26th February 2009

Some of the oldest words in the English language date back more than 20,000 years, it has been revealed.

Words like 'I', 'we', 'two', 'three' and 'five' were probably used by our ancestors in the Stone Age - and have changed very little since then.

Numerals and pronouns are the least resistant to change because they are used most frequently and have very precise meanings, researcher discovered.

In contrast, words that change rapidly across nations, languages and time are more likely to die off in the future.


Cavemen in the Stone Age may have understood words such as 'I' and ''we', scientists believe

All of the major languages in Europe, the Middle East and the Indian sub-continent developed from one original root and form the Indo-European family of languages.

Reading University's Dr Mark Pagel used a powerful supercomputer to cross-reference the use of words across this family of languages.

His team was able to look back through history and see at which point certain words diverged from a single common sound into two different languages.

This point of divergence allowed them to estimate the rough age of an individual word.

Their research found that there are around 200 words that are not specific to culture or technology and which are likely to have remained relatively unscathed through the ages.

Some of the very oldest words even pre-date the emergence of the original Indo-European root more than 9000 years ago.

Dr Pagel 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.'

The key finding was that the more often a word is used, the less likely it is to change over time.

The researchers could work out how old a word was by comparing it in languages that share a common heritage.

They are also able to work out which words are likely to disappear in the future.

For example, there are 46 different ways of saying the word 'dirty' in the Indo-European languages - all of which are completely unrelated.

This means that it is unlikely to survive the next 1,000 years in its present form.

The words 'squeeze', 'guts', 'stick' and 'bad' also differ hugely between related languages and so are unlikely to exist in the future.

The researchers used the power of an IBM supercomputer to track how words relate to one another over thousands of years.

'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 Dr Pagel.

From this, they have now developed a computer programme that will produce a list of words relevant to a given date - like a time-traveller's emergency phrasebook.

'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 the BBC.

'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.

'The words he would've used would've derived from a different common ancestral word to the English words that we're using today.'


The oldest words in English

I, who, we, thou, two, three, five


And the words that are likely to disappear

Dirty, squeeze, bad, guts, because, push (verb), smell (verb), stab, stick (noun), turn (verb), wipe

Source: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1156122/Revealed-The-worlds-oldest-words--ones-disappear.html