This weekend my bro put me onto a new site – Arts & Letters Daily. It’s basically intellectual brain candy: every day they cull what they perceive as ‘the best’ from a variety of newspapers and serve it up to you.
I was struck today by an article about which words have been around since the Ice Age. Researchers in the U.K. have been working on determining which words were likely used by our ancient predecessors. Their conclusion: “I”, “who”, “thou”, “two”, “three” and “five”.
What struck me about the article, though, was that the author’s tried to use their model to predict which words are most likely to disappear from English in the future. Top of the list: “throw”, “stick”, “dirty”, “guts” and “squeeze”. They do so by calculating the linguisitic history of words and essentially determining how rapidly the words have changed from common ancestors.
However, I couldn’t help but wonder how their model would account for the pace of change of technology. Think about it: until the 1500s, few people could read. In the mid-1800s, newspapers became mass media and now everyone is literate and surrounded by the written word: the web, newspapers, books, magazines, ads, etc. Does this proliferation of media actually make it less likely that words will change? Will it freeze our language as is and make it more likely that humans 10,000 years in the future will be able to converse with us?
Or will something else keep our language dynamic? Maybe globalization will lead to us all speaking a balkanized English where each country’s native tongue