

'Oldest English words' identified - ilamont
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7911645.stm

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ja2ke
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
<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.

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tocomment
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?

~~~
markessien
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
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.

~~~
markessien
Why do you say that writing has no effect on complexity? The longer a writing
tradition a language has, the more complex its grammar is. And complexity can
be measured objectively.

By complexity, I mean having additional words for particular things, instead
of describing with more words. For example, changing words to indicate future
or past tense.

If children learn this or not is completely irrelevant - a child is capable of
learning extremely complex communication forms - this has nothing at all to do
with the history of a language.

~~~
mechanical_fish
If complexity can be "objectively measured", then surely you can provide a
citation to a peer-reviewed article that supports your hypothesis?

Or has your objective measurement only been performed in secret?

The conventional wisdom, as I was taught it, is that the role of writing in
language development and evolution is so small that it's only hypothetically
detectable. That's partly because it's only in modern times that literacy has
been widespread, but also because the vast majority of humanity learns to
speak before learning to read - generally _years_ sooner.

Anecdotes aren't data, but in the absence of data I'd note that Navajo has a
legendarily tricky grammar and no tradition of writing, while I believe that
Mandarin Chinese grammar is said to be fairly straightforward once you get
past the phonology (which I have not, so I cannot say.)

~~~
markessien
I wrote in my parent comment that this was based on personal observation.
There is no such thing as conventional wisdom on such topics, there are just
widespread opinions:

Note, there are two points we are discussing here:

1\. Is there a way of saying that some grammar is more complex that others -
objectively?

2\. Does writing influence the complexity of the grammar?

Now, for both cases, I base my opinion of observation, and not off any
scientific papers. Since you are doing the same, the only way we can settle
this duel is by trying to show as many examples one way or the other to
resolve the issues.

Regarding the first question, I'll just assume that we both accept that there
is difference in complexity in grammar between languages. Or do you not think
so?

Regarding the second question, I'll say this:

* Chinese Grammar is simple, but it's very clear that Chinese style writing cannot have the same influence. If you do not know a chinese word, you cannot write it, and you cannot read it. As such, you are not likely to use it, and the word will tend to die. In western style writing, you can attempt to write a word from having heard it once. It's also much easier for words to live on, because words are easily copied.

* Unwritten Creole and Pidgin Languages always do very similar things to western languages - they strip it of certain grammatical constructs, and it ends up being like most unwritten languages - past tense and future tense are created by adding words, and not by changing words.

~~~
davidw
Ignoring everything else, I wanted to answer this one:

> 1\. Is there a way of saying that some grammar is more complex that others -
> objectively?

I think so. English verbs, for instance, are significantly easier to conjugate
than most other European languages. There's just less stuff to remember.

Another example with verbs is the subjunctive, which has all but disappeared
from English (I wish I _were_ , rather than I wish I was), but is still very
much required in a language like Italian, even in the present tense: (Credo
che sia importante instead of credo che e` importante, which is translated as
"I believe it's important").

~~~
sethg
When you take complexity out of one part of a natural language, it ends up
sneaking back in to another part.

English verbs by themselves are easy to conjugate, but English also uses a
large number of modal verbs (I _did_ write, he _is_ hacking, we _used to_
travel, she _had better_ shut up) that these other languages lack. So while a
native English speaker learning Spanish has to learn a lot of verb
conjugations, a native Spanish speaker learning English has to learn a lot of
modal verbs, and the special rules for conjugating verb phrases that contain
them.

~~~
davidw
Yeah, English has some gotchas too, but I don't think you can say it's a zero-
sum sort of thing where they all balance out exactly.

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herdrick
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.

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sedm0784
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."

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redder
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."

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tokenadult
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.

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biohacker42
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.

~~~
Xichekolas
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.

~~~
biohacker42
Right, so the older version of those words would be found in Germany.

~~~
Xichekolas
Yeah, but I'm saying that, based on the contents of the article, a more
accurate title would be: "Oldest human words that still happen to be used in
English found"

The words they discuss are really more 'sounds with meaning' where the sound
hasn't varied much relative to the meaning no matter which language or time
period you look in. Just because the language 'English' wasn't differentiated
before some century doesn't mean the words didn't exist.

~~~
myutdtme
The article title is poor - it should really be oldest indo-european language
words found. There are dialect words for 1,2,3 etc in England that are
considerably older than English (the people or the language).

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xenophanes
Why would the word 'bad' die out?

~~~
markessien
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
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._

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kubrick
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
+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.

~~~
davidw
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.

~~~
kubrick
I haven't even heard of that one -- I'll check it out. I'm almost done with
The Power of Babel, which covers a lot of the same ground as his TTC lectures.

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tontoa4
From the article

Oldest words: I, We, Two, Three

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

~~~
ardit33
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.

