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!
Saturday, 28 February 2009
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Damm, back to the drawing board then!
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