Translate

Saturday, 28 February 2009

A Rose In Any Other Language?

All bloggers need a language and mine, is English, obviously ... I mean if this was Spanish, you probably wouldn't be reading this .... err anyway, with English you get a lot of words to play with, as it is generally stated (within a very wide range), that English has around 250,000 to 300,000 words (when obsolete words, which still exist in some unabridged dictionaries aren't counted), and other languages such as Spanish, may have only approximately half that number.

However all languages have an ancestral beginning, such as Indo-European, and recent advances of super-computer power have allowed some of the oldest surviving words in English to be identified.

According to the University of Reading researchers, the words "I" and "who" are among the oldest, not only in English, but across all Indo-European languages, along with the words "two", "three", and "five". The word "one" is only slightly younger whereas the word "four" experienced a sort of linguistic evolutionary leap, that makes it significantly younger in English, and completely different from other Indo-European languages.

The oldest words we use today have been in existence for at least 10,000 years, but "50% of the words we use today would be unrecognisable to our ancestors living 2,500 years ago. If a time-traveller came to us, and told us he wanted to go back to that period, we could arm him with the appropriate phrase book, and hopefully keep him out of trouble" explained Mark Pagel, Professor of Evolutionary Biology at the University of Reading.

So there you are then, time travel would be much trickier than you thought!

1 comment:

  1. Damm, back to the drawing board then!

    ReplyDelete

All comments are welcomed, or even just thanks if you enjoyed the post. But please make any comment relevant to the post it appears under. Off topic comments will be blocked or removed.

Moderation is on for older posts to stop spamming and comments that are off topic or inappropriate from being posted .... comments are reviewed within 48 hours. I don't block normal comments that are on topic and not inappropriate. Vexatious comments that may cause upset to other commentators, or that are attempting to espouse a particular wider political view, are reviewed before acceptance. But a certain amount of debate around a post topic is accepted, as long as it remains generally on topic and is not an attempt to become sounding board for some other cause.

Final decision on all comments is held by the blog author and is final.

Comments are always monitored for bad or abusive language, and or illegal statements i.e. overtly racist or sexist content. Spam is not tolerated and is removed.

Commentaires ne sont surveillés que pour le mauvais ou abusif langue ou déclarations illégales ie contenu ouvertement raciste ou sexiste. Spam ne est pas toléré et est éliminé.

Followers

Blog Archive

Its a Pucking World

Its a Pucking World
Dreamberry Wine Cover

About Me

My photo
A middle aged orange male ... So 'un' PC it's not true....