Oldest words in English?

[Mark Mandel]

Always subject, of course, to eddies in the space-time continuum.

Mark Mandel



On Thu, Feb 26, 2009 at 3:01 PM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu> wrote:
> 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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>

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