<h1>More words dying and fewer words being added to languages in digital age: study</h1>
<small><a href="http://www.physorg.com/archive/19-03-2012/" class="textTag">March 19, 2012</a> by Bob Yirka</small> <a href="http://www.physorg.com/weblog/"><img src="http://cdn.physorg.com/tmpl/v3/img/img-dot.gif" alt="report" class="toolsicon report" height="14" width="60"></a>
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<img src="http://cdn.physorg.com/newman/gfx/news/2012/morewordsdyi.jpg" alt="More words dying and fewer words being added to languages in digital age: study" align="left"><p><a rel="lightbox" href="http://cdn.physorg.com/newman/gfx/news/hires/2012/morewordsdyi.jpg" title="Word extinction. The English word “Roentgenogram” derives from the Nobel prize winning scientist and discoverer of the X-ray, Wilhelm Röntgen (1845-1923). The prevalence of this word was quickly challenged by two main competitors, “X-ray” (recorded as “Xray” in the database) and “Radiogram.” The arithmetic mean frequency of these three time series is relatively constant over the 80-year period 1920-2000, 〈 f 〉 ≈ 10^-7, illustrating the limited linguistic “market share” that can be achieved by any competitor. We conjecture that the main reason “Xray” has a higher frequency is due to the “fitness gain” from its efficient short word length and also due to the fact that English has become the base language for scientific publication. Image (c) <i>Scientific Reports</i> doi:10.1038/srep00313">Enlarge</a></p>
</span>
<p class="desc">Word extinction. The English word “Roentgenogram”
derives from the Nobel prize winning scientist and discoverer of the
X-ray, Wilhelm Röntgen (1845-1923). The prevalence of this word was
quickly challenged by two main competitors, “X-ray” (recorded as “Xray”
in the database) and “Radiogram.” The arithmetic mean frequency of these
three time series is relatively constant over the 80-year period
1920-2000, 〈 f 〉 ≈ 10^-7, illustrating the limited linguistic “market
share” that can be achieved by any competitor. We conjecture that the
main reason “Xray” has a higher frequency is due to the “fitness gain”
from its efficient short word length and also due to the fact that
English has become the base language for scientific publication. Image
(c) <i>Scientific Reports</i> doi:10.1038/srep00313</p>
<p class="clear-left">
<strong>(PhysOrg.com) -- Adding new words to an existing language,
or dropping old ones is something people have always done. As new
things or ideas are discovered, new words crop up to describe them. But
now, in the digital age, that process appears to be slowing despite the
increased pace of new things arriving on the scene. In a paper in <i>Scientific Reports</i>,
a group from the Institutions Markets Technologies' Lucca Institute for
Advanced Studies in Italy, describe how they have found after studying
English, Spanish and Hebrew trends, that words are being dropped from
languages faster and new ones added at a slower rate, than at any other
time over the past three hundred years.</strong>
</p>
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<p>Suspecting that the addition of new <a href="http://www.physorg.com/tags/words/" rel="tag" class="textTag">words</a> to languages might be inhibited by modern tools such as spellcheckers, the team looked at 10<sup>7</sup> words that have been recorded by <a href="http://www.physorg.com/tags/google/" rel="tag" class="textTag">Google</a>
as part of its book digitizing process, which is now estimated to
represent somewhere near four percent of all of the world’s books.
Because they are in digital form, it is possible to perform statistical
analysis on them, which is just what the team did. In doing so, they
were able to note when new words appeared in a language and then to see
if they held on long enough to become permanent, or if they vanished
after a certain amount of time. Analyzed works included books from 1800
to 2008.</p>
<p>One of the most striking results the team found was that words being
lost from the three languages occurred more often in the past ten to
twenty years than in all of the other eras in the period of study. They
also found that newer words were being added less frequently during the
same period indicating that modern languages are shrinking. They suggest
that electronic spellcheckers introduced during this period might be
partly responsible for the change, as might the tendency to gravitate
towards a smaller vocabulary when writing emails and especially when
texting. They also cite the increased use of just one language, English,
in science endeavors and projects, regardless of native tongue.</p>
<p>Interestingly, the group also found that when new words are added in
the digital age, they tend to become mainstream much faster than
occurred in previous years, likely because of the same modern electronic
communications tools that are causing languages to constrict. They also
found that it generally takes at least forty years for new words to
become truly accepted as a part of a <a href="http://www.physorg.com/tags/language/" rel="tag" class="textTag">language</a>, and if that doesn’t happen, they tend to die.<br></p>
<p><b> More information:</b> Statistical Laws Governing Fluctuations in Word Use from Word Birth to Word Death, <i>Scientific Reports</i> 2, Article number: 313 <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/srep00313" target="_blank">doi:10.1038/srep00313</a></p>
<p><b>Abstract</b>
<br>We analyze the dynamic properties of 107 words recorded in English,
Spanish and Hebrew over the period 1800–2008 in order to gain insight
into the coevolution of language and culture. We report language
independent patterns useful as benchmarks for theoretical models of
language evolution. A significantly decreasing (increasing) trend in the
birth (death) rate of words indicates a recent shift in the selection
laws governing word use. For new words, we observe a peak in the
growth-rate fluctuations around 40 years after introduction, consistent
with the typical entry time into standard dictionaries and the human
generational timescale. Pronounced changes in the dynamics of language
during periods of war shows that word correlations, occurring across
time and between words, are largely influenced by coevolutionary social,
technological, and political factors. We quantify cultural memory by
analyzing the long-term correlations in the use of individual words
using detrended fluctuation analysis.</p><p><a href="http://www.physorg.com/news/2012-03-words-dying-added-languages-digital.html">http://www.physorg.com/news/2012-03-words-dying-added-languages-digital.html</a><br></p><p>
<br></p><br clear="all"><br>-- <br>=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+<br><br> Harold F. Schiffman<br><br>Professor Emeritus of <br> Dravidian Linguistics and Culture <br>Dept. of South Asia Studies <br>University of Pennsylvania<br>
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6305<br><br>Phone: (215) 898-7475<br>Fax: (215) 573-2138 <br><br>Email: <a href="mailto:haroldfs@gmail.com">haroldfs@gmail.com</a><br><a href="http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/">http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/</a> <br>
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