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Picture of Kalleh
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I found this phrase from the sports pages this morning, which is a great example of including the new and old: Speaking of the upcoming Bulls games - "The Bulls have a tough stretch on the docket (with nary a gimme out there)."

That reminded me of Bob's work "usen't to," as in "They usen't to allow shops to be open on Sundays." However, how about this? "They usen't to allow children in the gastropub on Sundays."

Can you come up with sentences with both an old and newish word in them?
 
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In trying to find what the oldest English words might be ("I," "we," "two" and "three?"), I found this interesting article.
 
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quote:
Originally posted by Kalleh:
In trying to find what the oldest English words might be ("I," "we," "two" and "three?"), I found this interesting article.


I remember that article. It made no sense to me.

quote:
For example, the words "I" and "who" are among the oldest, along with the words "two", "three", and "five". The word "one" is only slightly younger.

The word "four" experienced a linguistic evolutionary leap that makes it significantly younger in English and different from other Indo-European languages.


Why is one younger than two? Both words go back to Proto-Indo-European.

I assume the "linguistic evolutionary leap" they're talking about is that the Proto-Indo-European form for four began with /k/ and in Germanic it was replaced with /f/ (so English four but Latin quattuor).

So their definition of "old word" seems to be "word that has changed phonologically the least". That seems like a completely arbitrary definition.

quote:
"We think some of these words are as ancient as 40,000 years old.

From a historical linguistics perspective, that number is insane. The breakup of Proto-Indo-European happened around 2500 BC. 40,000 BC is way to old to let us reconstruct anything.

quote:
The sound used to make those words would have been used by all speakers of the Indo-European languages throughout history," Professor Pagel said.


Except that five has no phonemes in common with PIE *penkʷe-. who has no phonemes in common with PIE *kwo-. I has no phonemes in common with PIE *eǵ-. And so on; you get the idea. one has one phoneme in common with PIE *oi-no-, but would the ancient word have had an n 40,000 years ago?

quote:
"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 BBC News.
"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."


William the Conqueror spoke FRENCH.

Language Log wrote about it

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I don't know what the original research and paper looked like, but it is possible that the reporter(s) just garbled things up. In the BBC article linked to above, they talk about frequency of use of a lexical item being related to how slowly it changes over time. (Nothing said about whether the frequency of use over time is constant or also changes.) Also, sounds changing comes into it. They is a borrowing from Old Norse, whereas who, I, etc. are inherited into Old English from Proto-Indo-European via Proto-Germanic.

It sounds like Professor Pagel is doing some kind of research on what used to be called glottochronology (or the frequency of language change over time). Part of glottochronology is seeing which words have been replaced by other words changing meaning or new words being borrowed from other languages.

Professor Liberman's take on it good and succinct. Just more rubbish from clueless journalists.


Ceci n'est pas un seing.
 
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So the research has nothing to do with old and new words. It's about frequency of language change over time.

Still, Pagel's comment about some sounds remaining unchanged for 40,000 years seems really weird to me.
 
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Pagel's comment about some sounds remaining unchanged for 40,000 years seems really weird to me.

Oh, definitely. If that is what he said. But 10K years BP is about the limit of the depth. I know I was going to look for a cite for you, goofy, but I ended up asking Liberman, and he said that's what he remembered but no citation.


Ceci n'est pas un seing.
 
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Oh dear. Bad link. I am sorry. It's a good thing we have you guys around. Thank you!
 
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Sally Thomason expresses skepticism about this research: "I'm not qualified to judge Pagel et al.'s statistics, although I remain skeptical of their basic claim that words that haven't been replaced often in a handful of language families with vastly different time depths can be predicted to be super-stable in all language families."

The Washington Post has a new article on this research as well. It begins with this bit of weirdness:

quote:
You, hear me! Give this fire to that old man. Pull the black worm off the bark and give it to the mother. And no spitting in the ashes!

It’s an odd little speech. But if you went back 15,000 years and spoke these words to hunter-gatherers in Asia in any one of hundreds of modern languages, there is a chance they would understand at least some of what you were saying.

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You can find Pagel et al.'s new article here.

[Corrected link typo.]

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Ceci n'est pas un seing.
 
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Give this fire to that old man. Pull the black worm off the bark and give it to the mother. And no spitting in the ashes!

I started looking at the PIE roots for these words. Give, bark, and black replaced the usual PIE roots. That's 3 out of 12 "ultraconserved words" have decayed between PIE and English.

Fire is *peh₂ur and *lóbho/ehₐ for bark.


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The Washington Post article includes a recording of someone saying the reconstructed forms. "thou" is PIE *te- the accusative form of the singular second person pronoun. Why did they choose this form?

"give" is *do- (ie *deh₃- which doesn't have a native English reflex.)

"hand" sounds like "mar" (ie Pokorny's *mə-r-)

"bark" is *(s)ker- "to cut"

"spit" is *(s)ptēiw- I guess.

Three of the five PIE forms are not the actual etymons of the English words in question. So if they were replaced once, how do we know they weren't replaced before that as well?

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"thou" is PIE *te- the accusative form of the singular second person pronoun. Why did they choose this form?

Probably because it matches better to the other language family etyma in their database. The Dravidian is for some 2PS verbal ending, and not a pronoun.


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Great articles, though for some reason I could not pull up yours, however, z.
 
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though for some reason I could not pull up yours

Try it now, Kalleh. I made a dumb mistake and was in a hurry so I did not test the link. It should work.


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It's just the abstract, right? I had not heard that term "ultraconserved" words before. Linguistics is really an interesting field, isn't it? In your abstract, they derive a statistical model. Of course linguistics also is intricately related to history, languages and geography. Then it seems linguistics is related to information technology, though that connection is not as clear to me. Linguistics is one of the most diverse disciplines.
 
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It's just the abstract, right?

In the right-hand column, under the heading Access, there is a link for "the full text". Click on it and you can download the PDF version of the article.

I had not heard the term "ultraconserved" words before

Neither had I or just about any other linguist who read the paper (or articles). It's something the authors made up to explain how they got around the phonological and semantic change which after 10K years or so stop reconstruction from being possible. They posit this special class of words, which Thompson discuss in her review, to get around this physical limitation. (Sort of like how science fiction writers use FTL (faster than light) travel to get around the annoying speed of light and its impact on getting from one star system to another.

information technology

I would say, not just linguistics, but many other fields, too. If you look at what Pagel teaches it is bioinformatics. The thing about language (and its study, aka linguistics) is that it permeates other studies.


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Ah...I was finally able to pull up the whole article. You certainly have convinced me of the scholarliness of linguistics. That was quite an intense article. I really liked their critical analysis of their own statistical model, defending it in the face of possible criticisms. That is impressive. I wish more nursing articles did that.
 
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Though it's probably only obvious to linguists here's a nice take down of the whole thing.
And what Language Log has to say about it.


"No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money." Samuel Johnson.
 
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