From: Arnaud Fournet
Message: 60966
Date: 2008-10-17
----- Original Message -----
From: "mkelkar2003" <swatimkelkar@...>
To: <cybalist@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Thursday, October 16, 2008 10:34 PM
Subject: [tied] Probing the process of word evolution (in Indo European
languages)
>
> Section: SCIENCE NEWS This Week
> Probing the process of word evolution
>
> Here's an evolutionary talking point: Two new studies quantify parts
> of the mechanism by which frequently used words change slowly over
> many millennia whereas rarely used words more rapidly take on new
> forms.
>
> In fact, frequency of word usage exerts a "lawlike" influence on the
> rapidity of language evolution, the research teams conclude in the
> Oct. 11 Nature. This discovery offers a new tool for retracing the
> history of major language families, reconstructing ancient tongues,
> and predicting which words will undergo future alterations.
>
> "We expect all languages to diverge initially in the least frequently
> used parts of their vocabulary," says evolutionary biologist Mark
> Pagel of the University of Reading in England.
>
> Pagel's group focused on Indo-European languages. Some words for the
> same meanings differ strikingly across the more than 100 languages
> and dialects of that family, while others take similar forms.
>
> The researchers first determined 200 basic vocabulary meanings in 87
> Indo-European languages spoken during the past 6,000 to 10,000 years.
> They then applied a statistical technique to modern-language data in
> order to estimate the spoken frequencies of the corresponding words
> in English, Spanish, Russian, and Greek.
>
> Among those 200 meanings, commonly used words-such as who or night,
> and terms for numbers-evolved slowly and sounded similar in different
> languages. Such words undergo no more than one wholesale shift to a
> new form every 10,000 years, the scientists propose.
>
> In contrast, less frequently used words-such as dirty, turn, and guts-
> evolved more rapidly and sounded different across languages. These
> types of words change forms up to nine times every 10,000 years,
> according to the investigators.
>
> In the second new study, Harvard University genomics graduate student
> Erez Lieberman and his coworkers measured the rate at which English
> verbs have become regular-using the suffix "ed" to signify past tense-
> over the past 1,200 years. That linguistic period begins with Old
> English, includes Middle English around 800 years ago, and ends with
> English as it is spoken today.
>
> The team compiled a list of 177 irregular verbs in Old English. Of
> that number, 145 remained irregular in Middle English and 98 are
> still irregular today.
>
> The researchers then calculated the frequency of each verb's usage in
> Modern English and estimated frequencies for the two older tongues.
> They determined that an irregular verb used 100 times as often as
> another in daily conversation takes 10 times as long to become
> regular as the less-spoken verb does.
>
> If current trends continue, only 83 of the 177 verbs studied will be
> irregular in 500 years, the researchers predict. They predict that
> the next irregular verb to regularize will be wed, meaning that just-
> married couples will no longer be "newly wed" but will have
> blissfully "wedded."
>
> "Our results indicate that languages can evolve in such an orderly
> fashion that simple mathematical descriptions capture their
> behavior," Lieberman says. "A language's irregularities reveal the
> mechanisms shaping its evolution."
>
> The use of sophisticated statistical methods to quantify how words
> evolve on the basis of the frequency of their use "is an important
> step forward," remarks psycholinguist W. Tecumseh Fitch of the
> University of St. Andrews in Scotland.
>
> ~~~~~~~~
>
> posted by M. Kelkar
>
>
> ------------------------------------
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