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LISA MULLINS: I'm Lisa Mullins, and this is The World. And with me in the studio right now is The World's Alex Gallafent with a story about words.
ALEX GALLAFENT: So, Lisa, these are five words that I'm just going to read to you and I want to see if you can draw any conclusion from the words. I, who, two, three, and five.
MULLINS: Oh. Sorry. I, who, two, three, five.
GALLAFENT: Yeah. That's it.
MULLINS: Three of them are numbers.
GALLAFENT: Let me put you out of your misery.
MULLINS: I'm sorry to disappoint you.
GALLAFENT: The words are extraordinarily old.
MULLINS: They're old. Okay.
GALLAFENT: Like 10,000 years or more old.
MULLINS: And you know this how?
GALLAFENT: From the brain of a super computer which has been analyzing words back through time, looking at not the concepts but the words used to describe the concepts. And it's picked out those words that if you go back 10,000 years from now and you were to say the word “three†or the word “Iâ€, the sound would be sufficiently similar to the word used back then that you would be understood.
MULLINS: Any language? That's what we're talking about now.
GALLAFENT: Indo European language. That's what I'm talking about.
MULLINS: Okay.
GALLAFENT: And here's the lead researcher – a guy called Mark Pagel, who's a professor of Evolutionary Biology at The University of Reading, in the UK.
MARK PAGEL: Language changes very rapidly compared to the rate at which our genes evolve, but I think what we think is remarkable about these results we've come up with is some elements of language are changing so slowly that they are comparable to the rate of change of genes.
MULLINS: Okay. So they figured this out using algorhythms or models, et cetera. Did they come across other words, Alex, that we might expect would be extremely old? Horse, or food, or water? Something that would be relevant 10,000 years ago?
GALLAFENT: Right. Take the word “horse†or the concept of a hill, or the concept of bread. You'd think these words would be unchanged because the objects would be unchanged. But that's not necessarily the case. Here again is Mark Pagel at the University of Reading.
PAGEL: Many of those words we would expect would have what we call a “half-lifeâ€. That is there's about a 50 percent chance that they would change in a given amount of time. Their half-life, we would reckon, would be around 2,000 years for most of those words – maybe even less, maybe 1,000 to 1,500.
GALLAFENT: And the chances of a word say in English disappearing goes up, if there are more words in the pot for us to choose from. So take the concept of something being dirty. There are it seems 46 different words amongst the Indo European languages to describe the concept of dirty. So there are lots of options for the English language to pick and choose from as things mix up or melt together or the rest of it.
MULLINS: Okay. So the more competition like that, the more chance the word itself is going to die out?
GALLAFENT: Exactly. And get ready to lose the verbs to stab, to squeeze, to turn, to wipe, to push.
MULLINS: Wait. We turn and wipe and stab and squeeze all the time.
GALLAFENT: You should enjoy them because they could be gone – in 700 years or so, at least.
MULLINS: And we will miss them. Thank you, Alex Gallafent.
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The world in words