'Oldest English words' identified | Hacker News Reader

'Oldest English words' identified

news.bbc.co.uk

64 pointsilamont41 comments

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.)

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.

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?

I think use in formal writing slows it down most; the biggest changes from other Germanic languages such as loss of gender for nouns happened when English was a peasant language used under the French-speaking Norman aristocracy.

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.

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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").

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.

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.

The longer a writing tradition a language has, the more complex its grammar is.

Chinese is a very strong counterexample to your statement based on your definition of "complex grammar."

Read my reply to mechanical_fish regarding Chinese.

I'm curious, do you consider English grammar simpler than German? (The few people I've talked to about linguistics consider German to be a harder language for English speakers to learn than Spanish, which seems like it must be due to grammatical differences...)

English is a MUCH easier language grammatically than German. Just the fact that German has gender assignment on words increases the complexity of the German Grammar by a large amount.

Proto-Germanic (the common ancestor of English, German, Scandinavian etc.) was hardly ever written, but its reconstructed grammar is quite complex. Similarly complex as today's Icelandic.

Now I don't know much about this reconstruction process and how error-prone it is. But it's the best we can do for non-written languages of the past.

I don't know anything about the complexity of contemporary non-written languages.

The reconstruction is as likely to be flawed as not - we cannot base an opinion of a result that we are not sure is accurate at all.

Particularly when there are lots of modern day samples we can use as our comparison basis.

Writing is much more widespread in modern Spanish than classical Latin, is modern Spanish grammar more complex?

Writing was more widespread in classical Latin than in modern Spanish. Classical Latin, the type that we read today, was a high brow language, used by educated people. The normal people used Vulgar Latin.

Creole and pidgin languages are special cases though. They are simple because they are relatively new constructions, rather than because they are unwritten.

" Would it have been spoken by cavemen, would it have been simpler? What would be missing, future tense, abstract concepts we take for granted?"

The caveman language you describe look a lot like the language used by modern day teens.

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.

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."

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."

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.

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.

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.

>Some of those words they brought over might still be around

A lot of those word are still around (in one form or the other). For example at least those written in italics:

The words the Germans brought came from somewhere too. They didn't just create a new set when they moved to the British Isles.

"They" is of Scandinavian origin, by the way.

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

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.

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).

Why would the word 'bad' die out?

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.

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.

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).

+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.

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.

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.

From the article

Oldest words: I, We, Two, Three

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

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.

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