Oldest words in English?

[Laurence Horn]

At 12:30 PM -0500 2/26/09, Benjamin Zimmer wrote:
>Commentary on the Log from Mark Liberman, with more surely to follow...
>
>http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1186
>"Scrabble tips for time travelers?"
>

On the claim in LiveScience that "A game of Scrabble might not have
been all that different in Stone Age times"

based on the reported research--

"Using a computer simulation, a British researcher says he's examined
the rate of change of words in languages to reveal the oldest
English-sounding words, which would have been used by Stone Age
humans 20,000 years ago."

--the reporter might have noted that there's at least one fairly
striking way in which Scrabble in pre-literate times might have been
very different indeed, even abstracting away from minor factors like
the extent of lexical change and sound change over 20,000 years...

LH

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