Oldest words in English?

[Wilson Gray]

Not to mention that, 10,000 years ago, how would you even be able to
decide which three families, of all of the possible candidates - or it
may even have been a single family; at a remove of ten millennia, it's
impossible to know - were going to survive to give rise to the Angles,
Saxons, and Jutes?

But forget all that. How about a simple demonstration that a random
speaker of any contemporary variety of English can understand

Hwaet! We Gar-Denum yar-dagum ... (my memory may be betraying me,
here, but yawl gnome sane)

if someone simply walks up to him and says, "Hey, man! Check this
out!" and commences to rap. And Beowulf dates only from last week,
compared to ten millennia ago.

There's no need to go back to the past to test an assertion, when the
past can come forward to the present.

-Wilson
–––
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die"---a strange complaint to
come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
-----
-Mark Twain



On Thu, Feb 26, 2009 at 11:37 AM,  <RonButters at aol.com> wrote:
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> Sender: Â  Â  Â  American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster: Â  Â  Â  RonButters at AOL.COM
> Subject: Â  Â  Â Oldest words in English?
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Either the TIMES reporter was totally inept, or Dr. Pagel knows very little=20
> about language. The article is filled with nonsense. For example, the articl=
> e=20
> says in effect that the English numerals and the pronoun "I" would have been=
> =20
> intelligible to persons alive 10,000 or more years ago. This is obvious=20
> nonsense. The English numerals and pronouns were not even pronounced 1000 ye=
> ars ago as=20
> they are today. Moreover, the article seems to suggest that, just because=20
> modern languages use pronouns, any language that uses pronouns must be=20
> historically related. This is ridiculous, whether you are a Chomskyite ("pro=
> nouns are=20
> wired into the human brain") or a Skinnerite ("pronouns are so useful that=20
> 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=20
> work out how and when they diverged, and to trace the evolutionary history o=
> f=20
> individual words." But this is scarcely news. Linguists have been doing that=
> =20
> for 150 years. AMERICAN HERITAGE dictionary used to publish a supplement=20
> containing ProtoIndoEuropean roots. But no one has ever claimed that the fir=
> st humans=20
> 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:
>>=20
>> =A0 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7911645.stm
>> =A0 http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/science/article5805522.ece
>>=20
>> "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."
>>=20
>> Is much known to anyone on the list about the methodology involved?
>>=20
>>=20
>> --
>> Michael Quinion
>> Editor, World Wide Words
>> E-mail: wordseditor at worldwidewords.org
>> Web: http://www.worldwidewords.org
>>=20
>> ------------------------------------------------------------
>> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>>=20
>>=20
>
>
>
>
> **************
> Get a jump start on your taxes. Find a tax professional in your=20
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