The language loons get loonier?

The Got Medieval blog -- a not infrequently very informative blog on all things medieval -- has further thoughts on the whole "oldest English words"  story that has been making the rounds of the Web lately.  This was the story I wrote about yesterday .  And it apparently hasn't gotten any better.  It's gotten loonier and more hilarious.  One can just imagine, for example, some medieval gentleman striding into Tully's(a local coffee venue I like much better than Starbuck's) in swishing chain mail and trying to order "something"!  The help there would probably stare uncomprehendingly, especially if he was a medieval gentleman that didn't know any English, old or modern(yeah, there were plenty of those!).  As for the help, they'd probably think he was some street crazy.  Yeah we have some of those, and yeah, some of them "dress up" though I've never seen one in chain mail!  Even if he did manage to order coffee, he probably wouldn't have any idea what it was, and even if he understood it was something to drink, the chances are, he wouldn't like it, and probably he would try to trash the place with his trusty sword or mace or whatever(Hollywood would love that, I'm sure!). 

 

But it gets loonier, because there is a related story about the oldest word.  Not just the oldest English word.  The oldest word!. Got Medieval conjures up a visit to some cave family in their humble cave, with the "medieval" and the "time traveler" attempting to communicate.  Or maybe the cavepeople try to travel forward in time, to Tully's, and they are presented with coffee and try to drink some.  It doesn't exactly conjure up the Geico caveman, does it?  And whether or not they had words that in any way, shape, or form, were related to any modern words, English or otherwise, is, despite the efforts of the scientific gentlemen, completely unknown.  Still, I see a sitcom in there somewhere. . . .

Anne G

Medieval linguistics -- or something!

An article from the BBC has been making the rounds of several websites and blogs in the last few days. This article claims to have identified the oldest words in English.  Now I'm no expert on these things, but I do know that from the point in time the good linguistic scientists started from, there has been a lot of change in English.  Furthermore, some of this actually started entering the language before that point -- e.g. over 1000 years ago.  Which, I might add, gets us into the period of time I'm writing about.  Which is why I'm blogging about it!

 

In any case, these people have been criticized in various venues, including this one.  Their objections are quite reasonable, and suggest that the people who did this study, didn't think things through before they started talking to the BBC.  While it's true that there are certain "core words" in English, and many other languages as well, that a time traveler might pick up on, e.g. "mother", "father", "sister", "brother", words for numbers, and some others.  it's also true that many of these core words or their recognizable equivalents exist(and probably always have) in other "Indo-European" languages(English is an Indo-European language, as are French, Italian, Russian, Persian, and a number of others).  These words can probably be traced back a lot farther than Old English.  Second, a lot of sounds have changed in the last 1000 years; so have things like sentence structure(modern English doesn't really have case endings any more; Old English did), and the sounds were probably more like modern German than present-day English.  In other words, our time travelers would have had a hard time making out much of anything anybody said, let alone carrying on a conversation(unless they read Beowulf in Old English, or the equivalent).  There are people who study such things,  but these people aren't inclined to make "predictions" like this.  No, the people who did this study consider themselves hard scientists, but they seem quite ignorant and clueless as to why and how English has changed in the last 1000 years, and when they add French into the mix(they do), it's doubtful to me that any modern French speaker would be any better off trying to converse in Old French with somebody 1000 years ago.  The vocabulary and sentence structure in French hasn't changed as much, but the way a lot of words are pronounced , and vowel-shifting, sure has! 

 

Bottom line:  It's no wonder a lot of people don't understand science, and come out against it, when they should be for it.  These guys are a good example of why.  And they should go back to their labs, study a bit more, and not try to make statements about things they obviously don't know anything about.

Anne G