Oldest words in English?

[Jonathan Lighter]

If you're like me, you have in front of you a copy of Norris McWhirter's
_Guinness Book of World Records: New! Giant 1980 Super-Edition!_, and
you're looking at p. 207, which states:

"Some as yet unpublished research indicates some words of a
pre-Indo-European substrate survive in English, including apple (apal), bad
(bad), gold (gol), and tin (tin)."

Comments?

JL

On Fri, Feb 27, 2009 at 1:06 PM, Joel S. Berson <Berson at att.net> wrote:

> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       "Joel S. Berson" <Berson at ATT.NET>
> Subject:      Re: Oldest words in English?
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> At 2/27/2009 09:59 AM, Jonathan Lighter wrote:
> >The void of fancy?
>
> :-)  Very appropriate, for those for whom that's the pronunciation of
> "word".
>
> Joel
>
>
> >JL
> >
> >On Thu, Feb 26, 2009 at 9:52 PM, Joel S. Berson <Berson at att.net> wrote:
> >
> > > ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> > > -----------------------
> > > Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> > > Poster:       "Joel S. Berson" <Berson at ATT.NET>
> > > Subject:      Re: Oldest words in English?
> > >
> > >
> >
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> > >
> > > At 2/26/2009 02:28 PM, Laurence Horn wrote:
> > > >I use it all the time in my Words class,
> > > >but I have to say it (he) is prone to leaps of faith into which the
> > > >OED, for one, is not inclined to follow.
> > >
> > > Just what does one leap into when one is prone o leaps of faith?
> > >
> > > Joel
> > >
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