Link of the day: An interesting look at language-related stuff comes from the University of Reading, where researchers have used powerful computers to figure out which words in the English language have stuck around unchanged for the longest time and to predict which ones are likely to disappear in the future. The rundown is that “word types evolve in the following order (from slowest to fastest): numerals, pro-nouns, nouns, verbs, adjectives, prepositions and conjunctions.”
Scientists at the University of Reading have discovered that ‘I’, ‘we’, ‘who’ and the numbers ’1′, ’2′ and ’3′ are amongst the oldest words, not only in English, but across all Indo-European languages. What’s more, words like ‘squeeze’, ‘guts’, ‘stick’, ‘throw’ and ‘dirty’ look like they are heading for history’s dustbin – along with a host of others. . . .
Looking to the future, the less frequently certain words are used, the more likely they are to be replaced. Other simple rules have been uncovered – numerals evolve the slowest, then nouns, then verbs, then adjectives. Conjunctions and prepositions such as ‘and’, ‘or’, ‘but’ , ‘on’, ‘over’ and ‘against’ evolve the fastest, some as much as 100 times faster than numerals.
(Side note: This press release is really poorly written. Par for the course for language researchers, huh?)
It would be interesting to see similar research done on Japanese. What little I remember of the Heian-era stuff I studied back in the day was very different from what gets spoken in the streets of Tokyo today, although I suppose the numbers have remained relatively constant, and using the same kanji over all those centuries has given the vocabulary an anchor of sorts to keep it more static.
(Via the Tomedes Blog.)
