the oldest English words

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Yes: they’ve been found! (And they’re 40,000 years older than what you see above.) The prehistoric human sounds of meaning. Fossilised inside an algorithm like that 364-million-year-old fish at the Natural History Museum that had a smaller fish inside it; the archaeologists have all thought since the eighties that it had had a recent meal when it died, but now they think the bones inside its abdomenal area are (awwwwww) a baby fish.

Well, the fossils of words – the remnants of them in their oldest traces – that is, the sounds that remain after all else has changed, evolved, vanished – are being analysed and measured on an IBM supercomputer by researchers at Reading University, who have developed a way to predict the rates of change in language. Apparently Medieval manuscripts are a very useful source for finding particular words in use – that is, particular sounds in use to indicate particular meanings – at particular times. And they have databases of Indo-European word roots and word sounds from different languages and periods…

The idea is that:

Across the Indo-European languages – which include most of the languages spoken from Europe to the Asian subcontinent – the vocal sound made to express a given concept can be similar.

New words for a concept can arise in a given language, utilising different sounds, in turn giving a clue to a word’s relative age in the language.

Further into the article we get some more interesting information about time, and the way we use sound to develop our sense of meaning. Mark Pagel, the evolutionary biologist at the University of Reading, says:

We think some of these words are as ancient as 40,000 years old. The sound used to make those words would have been used by all speakers of the Indo-European languages throughout history.

Here’s a sound that has been connected to a meaning – and it’s a mostly arbitrary connection – yet that sound has persisted for those tens of thousands of years.

Professor Pagel told the BBC:

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.

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.

This means, I think, modern English words whose component sounds would have been meaningful in the same context at that time. This seems to me incredibly evocative: all these echoes, literally sounds we have been echoing off our ancestors for thousands and thousands of years – long before the advent of writing – remaining in us as traces of memory, shadows of meaning. Ghosts. It’s like a thing I heard on Radio 4 once – I swear I heard it – where someone purported to have recorded sounds that were “saved” in the walls of old buildings. Like, hundreds-of-years-old buildings. They played some tape, and it sounded like a cocktail party, everyone talking at once but all indistinct.

I’ve never seen this corroborated anywhere and there is no trace of it on the web – maybe the person was being presented as the Crackpot of the Day – who knows! But I swore I heard it and it was not a spoof.

As Professor Pagel puts it:

If you’ve ever played ‘Chinese whispers’, what comes out the end is usually gibberish, and more or less when we speak to each other we’re playing this massive game of Chinese whispers. Yet our language can somehow retain its fidelity.

Another thing our language retains is the way in which meaning does seem to reside in sound. This is one reason why poetry gains so much effectiveness, because poets work with their ears, they choose words for all kinds of reasons besides dictionary definition: those very wisps of connotation, the ghosts of previous meanings, trailing strands of suggestion, echoes of other sounds, implicit surprises in certain juxtapositions, colours and shadings, lights and shadows. These things all contribute to the richness of the language.

Anyway, the Reading researchers have also identified fastest-changing words, words most likely to (remain, disappear), etc. These include bad, guts, and stick (though it is unclear whether they mean the noun or the verb).

Finally apropos my previous post about Barack Obama’s Bad Grammar Mistake, it looks as if two of our oldest words are indeed I and me. Were they perhaps, like that fish, pregnant with this confusion from the very beginning?

If you increase that list to the four oldest words, they seem to be I, we, two, three. A lovely little rhyme set! And reminiscent, if I might be so bold, of Michael Jackson’s old hit, Ben (the one about the rat).

And: is it interesting to note that the word one (“the loneliest number”) is slightly younger? I.e., was it, like black pepper or nappies, a distress purchase?

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Tags: English, etymology, history of English, linguistics, words