The Oldest English Words
The oldest English words have been discovered by researchers at, I kid you not, Reading University in the UK. What are the oldest words in the English language you ask? They believe them to be ”I,” “who,” and “we” which go back as far as 40,000 years.
I’m a big fan of words, putting them together to make strings of sentences dance before you. I edit my own speech mid sentence if I come up with a better formation, or complementation of words. But the people at Reading University, go beyond my mild fascination.
“We have lists of words that linguists have produced for us that tell us if two words in related languages actually derive from a common ancestral word… We have descriptions of the ways we think words change and their ability to change into other words, and those descriptions can be turned into a mathematical language.” - Professor Pagel
They can figure out which words won’t be around in the next thousand years, based on the number of other words we have to say the same thing. Spoiler alert “push,” “turn,” “wipe” and “stab” probably won’t be around next millennia.
So how did the wordsmiths over at Reading University figure out which words were the oldest? They based part of it on usage. These guys figured out that the most commonly used words were the ones that changed less frequently. Think about how often you say “I” or “we” on a daily basis. You could see then how unlikely it would be for something like that to change in our vocabulary.
[BBC]
