Oldest words in English?

[RonButters at AOL.COM]

Either the TIMES reporter was totally inept, or Dr. Pagel knows very little 
about language. The article is filled with nonsense. For example, the article 
says in effect that the English numerals and the pronoun "I" would have been 
intelligible to persons alive 10,000 or more years ago. This is obvious 
nonsense. The English numerals and pronouns were not even pronounced 1000 years ago as 
they are today. Moreover, the article seems to suggest that, just because 
modern languages use pronouns, any language that uses pronouns must be 
historically related. This is ridiculous, whether you are a Chomskyite ("pronouns are 
wired into the human brain") or a Skinnerite ("pronouns are so useful that 
people would be likely to invent them if their language didn't have them").

Of course, it IS true that "By comparing these languages, it is possible to 
work out how and when they diverged, and to trace the evolutionary history of 
individual words." But this is scarcely news. Linguists have been doing that 
for 150 years. AMERICAN HERITAGE dictionary used to publish a supplement 
containing ProtoIndoEuropean roots. But no one has ever claimed that the first humans 
spoke PIE.


In a message dated 2/26/09 4:07:32 AM, wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG writes:


> The BBC ran an item this morning on research into the oldest words in the
> language, picking up a story in The Times:
> 
>   http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7911645.stm
>   http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/science/article5805522.ece
> 
> "Dr Pagel has recently been able to track the evolutionary history of Indo-
> European back almost 30,000 years, using a new IBM supercomputer. He said
> that some of the oldest words were well over 10,000 years old."
> 
> Is much known to anyone on the list about the methodology involved?
> 
> 
> --
> Michael Quinion
> Editor, World Wide Words
> E-mail: wordseditor at worldwidewords.org
> Web: http://www.worldwidewords.org
> 
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
> 
> 




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