A handy little guide to small talk in the Stone Age
Mark Henderson, Science Editor
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/science/article5805522.ece
A "time traveller's phrasebook" that could allow basic communication
between modern English speakers and Stone Age cavemen is being
compiled by scientists studying the evolution of language.
Research has identified a handful of modern words that have changed so
little in tens of thousands of years that ancient hunter-gatherers
would probably have been able to understand them.
Anybody who was catapulted back in time to Ice Age Europe would stand
a good chance of being intelligible to the locals by using words such
as "I", "who" and "thou" and the numbers "two", "three" and "five",
the work suggests.
More nuanced conversation would be more of a challenge. The analysis
of language evolution suggests that none of the adjectives, verbs and
nouns used in modern languages would have much in common with those
used then.
Mark Pagel, of the University of Reading, who leads the research, said
that it was nonetheless becoming possible to create a rudimentary
Stone Age phrasebook made up of the oldest known words.
"If a time traveller wanted to go back in time to a specific date, we
could probably draw up a little phrasebook of the modern words that
are likely to have sounded similar back then," he told The Times. "You
wouldn't be able to discuss anything very complicated, but it might be
enough to get you out of a tight spot."
Dr Pagel's research also predicts which parts of modern vocabulary are
likely to survive into English as it will be spoken 1,000 years in the
future, and which will die out.
By the year 3000, words such as "throw", "stick", "dirty", "guts" and
"squeeze" could easily be gone. These already differ greatly between
related languages, such as English and German, and are good candidates
to evolve into new forms.
Dr Pagel has tracked how words have changed by comparing languages
from the Indo-European family, which includes most of the past and
present languages of Europe, the Middle East and the Indian
sub-continent. All are derived from the same root and have many
linguistic similarities.
The word "water", for example, is wasser in German, eau in French and
aqua in Italian and Latin. Although each is slightly different, they
share a similar sound that shows them to share a common linguistic
ancestor.
By comparing these languages, it is possible to work out how and when
they diverged, and to trace the evolutionary history of individual
words.
Dr Pagel has recently been able to track the evolutionary history of
Indo-European back almost 30,000 years, using a new IBM supercomputer.
He said that some of the oldest words were well over 10,000 years old.
As the original Indo-European language is thought to date back no more
than 9,000 years, Dr Pagel believes that some of the longest-lived
words have an even more venerable history. "I can say with confidence
that there are sounds or words that predate Indo-European," he 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."
Dr Pagel's work has shown that the pace at which words evolved depends
on how they are used. Numerals are the slowest to change, followed by
pronouns, probably because they are used extremely often and have a
very precise and important meaning.
These words are highly resistant to evolution, in the same way as
important genes look similar across many different species because
mutations cause a damaging loss of functionality. "Just as we have
highly conserved genes, we have highly conserved words," Dr Pagel
said. "Language shows a truly remarkable fidelity."
Nouns evolve more slowly than verbs, and verbs evolve more slowly than
adjectives. Words that are used less frequently evolve more quickly
than those that are common.
The website http://www.evolution. reading.ac.uk/WordChanges/ shows
whether particular modern English words are likely to be similar or
different for any date in the past or future.
A continuing evolution
The oldest words, resistant to evolution
I, Who, We, Thou, Two, Three and Five
Words that are evolving rapidly, and likely to disappear
Dirty, squeeze, bad, because, guts, push (verb), smell (verb), stab,
stick (noun), turn (verb), wipe
Source: University of Reading
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