Words which word is older

Sometimes it’s easy to tell which one of two words first entered the English language (ax probably came before airplane, for instance). Sometimes it’s hard to tell. The words in the following quiz are in the second category. Our dates on these words are based on current research — if you have concrete evidence of earlier usage of any of these words please send it to us and if it checks out you’ll be famous! We’ll put your picture in the dictionary!! You get to choose the next word we add to the dictionary!!! Eh, not really.

I

What did the first words sound like? Did cavemen grunt like they do in cartoons and movies? Did they say, “me, man, you, woman”? Weeellllll, humans have been speaking for more than 50,000 years (some estimates say 150,000 years), so we really don’t know what they sounded like. Evidence of written language dates back only 4,000 years.

But if we want a clue as to how the building blocks of language developed, we can take a look at the oldest identified words. And that’s just what researchers at the University of Cambridge did when they studied 23 words in an extremely ancient language believed to have been spoken around the Black Sea area. These words gave rise to an extensive language family, Indo-European, which includes everything from Sanskrit to Latin to Russian to Irish to, yes, English.

Researchers found the meaning of these early words hadn’t changed much over thousands of years, showing how truly durable they are. Just think, you could show up to a Paleolithic barbecue some 15,000 years ago and actually talk to your ancestors!

What’s the first word you’d need to introduce yourself? How about I, the ultimate pronoun? This first-person singular personal pronoun develops from the Old English ic and ih. Humans have always needed a way to refer to themselves (as opposed to their mother, brother, husband, child). Self-identity was and always will be important. It would make sense that some of the most basic, nuts-and-bolt words are very old. 

Read on to learn which other English words link back to the oldest words we know.

Have a look at these three sets of words and see if you can guess which entered the language first.

A.-

Check the answers for set «A» here

B.-

Check the answers for set «B» here

C.-

Check the answers for set «C» here

Source: Oxford Words blog

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Some of the oldest words in the English language date back more than 20,000 years, it has been revealed.

Words such as ‘I’, ‘we’, ‘two’, ‘three’ and ‘five’ were probably used by our ancestors in the Stone Age — and have changed very little since then.

Numerals and pronouns are the least resistant to change because they are used most frequently and have very precise meanings, researchers have discovered.

In contrast, words that change rapidly across nations, languages and time are more likely to die off in the future.

Cavemen in the Stone Age may have understood words such as ‘I’ and »we’, scientists believe

All of the major languages in Europe, the Middle East and the Indian sub-continent developed from one original root and form the Indo-European family of languages.

Reading University’s Dr Mark Pagel used a powerful supercomputer to track the evolution of words in this family of languages back through about 20,000 years.

His team was able to look through history and see at which point certain words diverged from a single common sound into two different languages.

This point of divergence allowed them to estimate the rough age of an individual word.

Their research found that there are around 200 words that are not specific to culture or technology and which are likely to have remained relatively unscathed through the ages.

Some of the very oldest words even pre-date the emergence of the original Indo-European root more than 9,000 years ago.

Dr Pagel said: ‘If you look at «thou», «I» and «who», we can now tell they are probably at least 15,000 to 20,000 years old. The sounds used then for these meanings were probably very similar to those used today.’

The key finding was that the more often a word is used, the less likely it is to change over time.

The researchers could work out how old a word was by comparing it in languages that share a common heritage.

They are also able to work out which words are likely to disappear in the future.

For example, there are 46 different ways of saying the word ‘dirty’ in the Indo-European languages —  all of which are completely unrelated.

This means that it is unlikely to survive the next 1,000 years in its present form.

The words ‘squeeze’, ‘guts’, ‘stick’ and ‘bad’  also differ hugely between related languages and so are unlikely to exist in the future.

The researchers used the power of an IBM supercomputer to track how words relate to one another over thousands of years.

‘We have lists of words that linguists have produced for us that tell us if two words in related languages actually derive from a common ancestral word,’ said Dr Pagel.

From this, they have now developed a computer programme that will produce a list of words relevant to a given date — like a time-traveller’s emergency phrasebook.

‘You type in a date in the past or in the future and it will give you a list of words that would have changed going back in time or will change going into the future,’ Professor Pagel told the BBC.

‘From that list, you can derive a phrasebook of words you could use if you tried to show up and talk to, for example, William the Conqueror.

‘The words he used would have derived from a different common ancestral word to the English words that we’re using today.’

The oldest words in English

I, who, we, thou, two, three, five

And the words that are likely to disappear

Dirty, squeeze, bad, guts, because, push (verb), smell (verb), stab, stick (noun), turn (verb), wipe

The top 20 oldest words in order of age