Oldest words in English?

[Laurence Horn]

At 2:04 PM -0500 3/1/09, Baker, John wrote:
>         I'm doubtful that tin has been known long enough to be from a
>pre-Indo-European substrate.  Wikipedia says it was used in bronze by
>3500 BC, but I doubt if it's much older than that, and I assume that
>words from a pre-Indo-European substrate would have to be quite a bit
>older.  Apples, badness, and gold, of course, do have the requisite
>antiquity, but when one part of a claim is demolished, I tend to look
>askance at its remaining parts.
>
>
>John Baker

The irony (perhaps intended by Jon) is that we were just discussing
the "scientific claim" (purveyed by the BBC and other sources) that
we can predict of a few of our current English words that they won't
be around for those time-travelers' Scrabble games in the prehistoric
past or the distant future because they're so unstable--and one of
those words was "bad".

LH

>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: American Dialect Society [mailto:ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] On Behalf
>Of Jonathan Lighter
>Sent: Sunday, March 01, 2009 11:06 AM
>To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
>Subject: Re: Oldest words in English?
>
>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"Some as yet unpublished research indicates some words of a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
>
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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org