Evolution of language: Mathematicians performed a quantitative study of the rate at which English verbs such have become more regular with time. Of the list of 177 irregular verbs they took from Old English, only 98 are still irregular today.
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SYDNEY: In a finding that parallels the evolution of genes, researchers have shown that the more frequently a word is used, the less likely it is to change over long periods of time.
Two independent research groups have found that words spoken more often have a survival advantage over their less-uttered counterparts. This is both in terms of their persistence through time and the grammatical rules that apply to them.
"The frequency with which specific words are used in everyday language exerts a general and law-like influence on their rates of evolution," write the authors of one of the studies, both of which are published this week in the British journal Nature.
Mathematical description
The question of why some words evolve rapidly through time while others are conserved – often with the same meaning in multiple languages – has long plagued linguists. Two teams of researchers have tackled this question from different angles, each arriving at a similar conclusion.
Anyone who has tried to learn English will have been struck by its surfeit of stubbornly irregular verbs, which render grammatical rules unreliable. The past tense of regular verbs is formed by adding the suffix '-ed', but this luxury is not afforded to their irregular kin.
Over time, however, some irregular verbs 'regularise'. For instance, the past tense of 'help' used to be 'holp', but now it is 'helped'.
Mathematician Erez Lieberman from Harvard University in Massachusetts, U.S., and his team performed a quantitative study of the rate at which English verbs such as 'help' have become more regular with time. Of the list of 177 irregular verbs they took from Old English, only 98 are still irregular today.
Amazingly, the changes they observed obey a very precise mathematical description: the half-life of an irregular verb is proportional to the square root of its frequency. In other words, the more an irregular verb is used, the longer it will remain irregular.
Ultra-conserved words
A separate group of academics, led by evolutionary biologist Mark Pagel from the University of Reading, in England, used a statistical modelling technique to study the evolution of words from 87 different Indo-European languages.
"Throughout its 8,000 year or so history, all Indo-European language speakers have used a related sound to communicate the idea of 'two' objects – duo, due, deux, dos, etc.," Pagel said. "But there are many different and unrelated sounds for the idea of, for example, a bird – uccello, oiseau, pouli, pajaro, vogel, etc."
Before now, however, nobody had proposed a mechanism for why some words should evolve more quickly than others.
Through their analysis, Pagel's team found that frequently spoken words, such as numbers, form a core group of 'ultra-conserved' words that have changed very little over thousands of years, while less common words have diverged considerably over time.
"Our research helps us to understand why we can still understand bits of Chaucer and why we can instinctively recognise words in other Indo-European languages, just from their sounds," Pagel said.
Psychologist and language expert Russell Gray, from the University of Auckland in New Zealand, was impressed by both findings. "Despite all the vagaries and contingencies of human history it seems that there are remarkable regularities in the processes of language change," he commented.
ALL indo-european languages?
"Throughout its 8,000 year or so history, all Indo-European language speakers have used a related sound to communicate the idea of 'two' objects – duo, due, deux, dos, etc.," Pagel said.
What about zwei, meaning two in German? That's pronounced 'tsvai'. Nothing like due etc.
Being a germanic language,
Being a germanic language, of course "zwei" will be different that the two/deux of the romance languages. The Slavic languages such as Russian and Polish are different too.
What piques my interest though would be to know how the quantifiable data changes when the words in question would be broken down by etymology - would germanic based words have more staying power than their romantic counterparts, or vice versa because Latin has such a stronghold on the English language (which ironically, is considered a Germanic language)
Eh, just a thought
numbers...
What's interesting is that in one particular slavic language, croatian, the root word for 'two' is dva... owing to the latin-style grammatical declension system, dva will morph into phorms like 'dvoje' depending on the context... from what i've heard ov other slavic languages, a similar sort ov sound occurs!
as to the second part ov yr comment, from my experience the etymological national/cultural 'home' ov a word is often less ov a factor than the usefulness ov a word in a multitude ov situations, my favourites being 'thing' and 'stuff'...
actually zwei fits in with
actually zwei fits in with the Romance languages too, as does English two and Dutch twee; all of these words are descended from a single Indo-European ancestor, dwo, but have had different phonological changes applied to them over time. You just need to think of the word in terms of phonemes, not letters.
d is a dental plosive, so is t (made with breath released through the teeth)
w is a semivowel
o is a vowel.
duo, due, two, twee all fit easily into this pattern.
In French (deux) and Welsh (dau), the semivowel has been lost. In Spanish (dos) and Greek (dos), the word has shifted slightly again.
In German, the pronunciation of w has changed to a different phoneme (v), and the dental at the front is now 'ts' (z).
Just to show that the sound changes are consistent, look at how the number ten has worked out in those languages too.
D
Fr: deux, dix
Sp: dos, diez
It: due, dieci
Lat: duo, decem
Gk: dos, deka
Welsh: dau, deg
T
Eng: two, ten.
Dutch: twee, tien
Z
German: zwei, zehn
Dominique Jacques
Dominique Jacques is a world-class Alexander Technique teacher. She trained under FM Alexander's principle proteges, Walter Carrington, and has over 30 years of experience.