Oldest English Words Revealed?
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.
Among the Stone Age words that presumably would've sounded then much like they do now in the English language: I, we, two and three.
The study concludes that the frequency with which a word is used relates to how slowly it changes through time, so that the most common words tend to be the oldest ones. While it cannot necessary predict exactly what words were used 20,000 years ago — there's little to go on, since writing was invented only about 5,000 years ago — it makes some interesting guesses.
Source
Among the Stone Age words that presumably would've sounded then much like they do now in the English language: I, we, two and three.
The study concludes that the frequency with which a word is used relates to how slowly it changes through time, so that the most common words tend to be the oldest ones. While it cannot necessary predict exactly what words were used 20,000 years ago — there's little to go on, since writing was invented only about 5,000 years ago — it makes some interesting guesses.
Source
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Comments
re oldest words, have a feeling that i read the the word "EWE" meaning female sheep was one of the oldest words too
Having observed five beautiful boys being born, develop, assimilate sounds, direction and feelings, the first emotion is love of the parents for their life. The second is the desire for food and attention and the earliest method of communication is to point and grunt. perhaps the first word was "ugh"or "unh". I see the first need for speech is to acquire what you need for personal satisfaction. While I am speaking about children, I think it follows the same route in primal society in the early stages of speech.
I am not sure I see the point of this sort of speculation and to some extent it sounds to me like the kind of ephemeral stuff that keeps university "researchers" employed. That sounds harsh but the fact is that I cannot possibly see how English words like "one" or "two" etc can possibly be proved to be related to words spoken by ancestors of 20,000 years ago! We will simply never know. It is and always will be supposition and guess work. It's fun to play with these notions, of course, but , anyway, why would the things our cavemen forefathers said sound like English? Or vice versa? There are of course similarities in different languages spoken today, but just as many differences (English 'I', Dutch 'ik' or German 'ich' to name just a few, but just across the Channel in Fance they say 'je'. Etc.) But the similarities have more to do with a common ancestral language which would be much, much younger than what people spoke in Britain and the rest of Europe 20,000 years ago, and European languages today are all part of the Indo-European family (and Indo-Iranian sub-family) of languages. One of the oldest known members of this family is Vedic Sanskrit that is itself no older than around 1500 BC. It (and, a little later, classical Sanskrit, Greek, Latin) seems to have Asian origins. It seems fanciful to suggest that in some way, the cave dwellers in western Europe were already using words sounding like or even derived from these eastern languages 15,000 years vearlier.