Language Change
Use It or Lose It: Why Language Changes over Time
More commonly used words are the least likely to evolve
By Nikhil Swaminathan
from Scientific American online Oct. 10, 2007;
CONSTANTLY EVOLVING: Two new studies show the words in a language that are used infrequently are subject to change rapidly over time. Image: © ISTOCKPHOTO/RAPHAEL DANIAUD
The words used the most in everyday language are the ones evolving at the slowest rate, say two new studies published in Nature.
In one paper, researchers at Harvard University focused on the evolution of English verb conjugations over a 1,200-year period. In a separate study, a team at the University of Reading in England reviewed cognates (similar sounding words in different languages for the same object or meaning, such as "water" and the German "wasser") to determine how all Indo-European tongues progressed from a common ancestor that existed between 6,000 and 10,000 years ago.
"What our frequency effect allows us to do is identify…ultraconserved linguistic elements," says Mark Pagel, an evolutionary biology professor at Reading, about his research. "Namely, they're the words we use all the time."
In their search for cognates, Pagel and his team examined some 200 words in 87 Indo-European languages, including those for "water," "two," "to die" and "where." The number of distinct classes of cognates for each word ranged from one (indicating all the words sound similar) for frequently used concepts such as numbers to as many as 46 different basic sounds to describe a single entity such as a bird. The word for the number three in all Indo-European languages, for instance, is similar to the English version: from tres in Spanish to drei in German to the Hindi theen. In contrast, the word for bird has several different sounds associated with it like pajaro in Spanish and oiseau in French.
The researchers then narrowed their focus to the frequency of use of each of the words in just four Indo-European languages—English, Spanish, Greek, and Russian. Pagel says the team found that they were used at similar rates across the board even if the words with the same meaning were not cognates. "The high frequency words in Spanish are the same as the high frequency English," he says. "That [indicated] that we could come up with a kind of Indo-European frequency of use."
By combining their data, the researchers determined that it would take as little as 750 years to replace less-used words and up to 10,000 years for new words to evolve in place of the most frequently used ones.
The Harvard researchers specifically studied the roots of English, tracing verb conjugations in the language from the time of Beowulf 1,200 years ago through Shakespeare in the 16th century to its current form. Over the years, several past tense forms of verbs have died out in English and now only one persists as a rule: adding "-ed" to the end of verbs. (Verbs that end in "-ed" in their past tense form "regular verbs" in modern English.)
Researchers scoured grammatical texts dating back to the days of Old English, cataloguing all the irregular verbs they came across. Among them: the still irregular "sing" / "sang," "go" / "went" as well as the since-regularized "smite" which once was "smote" in Old English but since has become "smited," and "slink," which is now "slinked" but 1,200 years ago was "slunk." They located 177 verbs that were irregular in Old English and 145 that were still irregular in Middle English; today, only 98 of the 177 verbs have not been "regularized.'"
After calculating the frequency of use of each of the 177 irregular Old English verbs, researchers determined that the words that evolved most quickly into regular conjugational forms were used significantly less than those that went unchanged over time. In fact, their statistical analysis determined that given two verbs, if one was used 100 times less frequently than the other, it would evolve 10 times faster than the verb employed more often. They predict the next verb to fall into line will be wed, the past tense of which will regularize from wed to wedded.
By being more frequent, a verb is more stable," says study co-author Erez Lieberman, a graduate student in applied mathematics at Harvard University. He adds that both the Harvard and Reading papers lay out a case for a version of natural selection that acts on linguistic evolution and mirrors biological evolution. "Both studies," he says, "illustrate this profound effect that frequency has in the survival of a word."
Partha Niyogi, author of the book The Computational Nature of Language Learning and Evolution and a professor of computer science and statistics at the University of Chicago, says these empirical findings are consistent with theoretical models on the lexical evolution. "Languages are constantly changing," he notes. "In biological evolution that fact has been given a lot of attention, but the fact is that in languages this is happening all the time, [as well]. Darwin in [The Descent of Man] commented that languages were evolving over time, and it was just like speciation."
New word order
The English language is evolving faster than ever. How can the dictionaries hope to keep up? DJ Taylor on the never-ending struggle to pin down meaning
- DJ Taylor
- The Guardian, Sunday 1 July 2001
On the reference shelves of the high-street book chains, the lexicography wars are hotting [sic] up. The past few days have seen the arrival of two new dictionaries on the market: the latest edition of the Collins Concise and, taking advantage of technology only recently available to dictionary compilers, the new online supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary. In what has never been a notably fast-moving world, speed, suddenly, is all. The Collins effort was last revised as recently as 1999 - a bat of the eye in etymological time - while the Oxford online supplement is now updated quarterly.
But English dictionaries - suitably enough in a world where English has become the standard business language - are a hugely competitive, and highly remunerative, trading arena. Each new recension [sic], consequently, comes crammed with eye-catching neologisms ripe to be seized upon by newspaper columnists. The Collins, for example, advertises definitions of such new-fangled additions to the word hoard as "trustafarian" (a young person relying on inherited wealth able to live a "supposedly ethnic lifestyle, often in an impoverished part of an inner city") and "presenteeism" (working longer hours as a way of showing off to your employer). The OED, on the other hand, has laboured to produce three likely-sounding origins for "the full monty": the 45-card version of the Spanish card game monte, the lavish wartime breakfasts enjoyed by Field-Marshal Montgomery, and the three-piece suits made by the gents' outfitting firm Montague Burton are all offered as plausible candidates.
Lurking behind these files of up-to-the-minute colloquialisms and lately coined acronyms (sample offering "FAQ", which stands for "frequently asked questions") is evidence of much more serious intent. Naturally, any dictionary compiler worth his or her salt strives for immediacy - although one can confidently predict that at least half the new entrants such as "brain up" ("to make intellectually sophisticated") and "planet Zog" ("a place or situation far removed from reality") will have been marked down as "obscure" 10 years hence - but he or she also craves authority.
Lexicography, from Samuel Johnson down, is about reputation. Hence the claim of the Collins writers that their 200 post-1999 additions accurately reflect the way that 58m Britons talk to each other, or the OED's talk of its 50-strong staff and the army of volunteers eagerly beaming in dispatches from the world of action films, soaps and quiz programmes ("where the language is busy just now", according to the OED's chief editor, John Simpson). If language is a butterfly, endlessly and effortlessly soaring above the heads of the entomologists who seek to track it down, then the nets are getting larger every year.
Lexicography also has its theorists: people who are anxious to take time out from the process of supplying definitions to words to reflect on the thornier problem of why one needs a dictionary in the first place. To provide a snapshot of something that will always exist in transition, or to lay down rules on what can or cannot be spoken and written? Like much else in English lexicography, the trail leads back to Johnson's dictionary, first published in 1755 and regarded as authoritative for almost a century.
In his preface, while praising the English simplicity of form, Johnson makes it plain that he thinks the spirit of the English language has been unduly influenced by the contending spirit of the French. Johnson goes on to reject the idea, common on the continent, that language should be fixed and maintained by the authority of an Academy. Language, according to the Johnsonian model, will always be self-governing, self-regulating, follow its own laws. Supervision by the language police, however well intentioned, will always fail.
Johnson's influence on the subsequent development of English lexicography was immense. It was also - necessarily - problematic. The idea of language following its own laws might make a splendid first principle, but Johnson himself was fond of proclaiming his own judgments and usages. The torch that he handed down to language custodians such as HW Fowler, author among much else of the immortal and nitpicking Fowler's English Usage (1926), is burning brightly a quarter of a millennium later.
And already, even in the post-Johnsonian age, rises the scent of the great lexicographical paradox. Language needs to be pinned down, yet such is the labour required to trap and dissect it that one finishes the operation to find that the beast has transformed itself into something else. Whatever else they may have been, the great trailblazing dictionaries were not short-term enterprises. Work on the "New" Oxford English Dictionary, begun in 1878 under the supervision of the legendary Sir James Murray, stretched deep into the 20th century. Volumes A-H were eventually published in 1900, but when Murray died 15 years later, volumes U-Z were still incomplete. It was not until 1928 that the equally legendary CT Onions wrote the final entry ("zyxt" - Scrabble players take note).
Five decades in the making, the New Oxford offers an unrelenting chronicle of the perils to which the dictionary compiler is subject. Not only was immense skill required of the team of lexicographers (the young JRR Tolkien's entry for "wasp" - not a particularly difficult word, apparently - cites comparable forms in Old Saxon, Middle Dutch, Modern Dutch, Old High German and 10 other languages besides), but many of the words were already changing in the space between original definition and publication. "Blouse", for instance, started off in 1887 as "light loose upper garment of linen or cotton, resembling a shirt or smock-frock", without particular reference to ladies' fashions. But clothing styles were changing: the Concise Oxford Dictionary of a few years later, edited by Fowler and his brother Frank, was forced to offer the refinement "woman's loose light bodice visible only to the waist, and there belted".
It could be argued that tracing the progress of a word like "blouse" is a relatively easy task for a lexicographer with a decade's worth of fashion magazines to hand. Other words and expressions come so deeply buried in the colloquial compost that extraction is almost impossible. A good modern example might be the adjective "groovy". My 20-year-old copy of the Concise Oxford reproduces, among other meanings, the standard 60s hipster definition of "to groove" as "give pleasure to", as in "What a groovy record". Before the second world war, however - and this is verifiable in novels of the period - it meant "stuck in a groove", with old-fashioned people instructed: "Don't be so groovy." Here in 2001, you fancy that its use is largely ironic and that anyone who wanders into a party and proclaims that "this is a groovy scene" simply wants to raise a laugh. To register this kind of incremental shift - from reversal of original meaning to subsequent ironic gloss - requires a kind of language bushman, capable of spotting the faintest tracks on the upturned etymological soil.
To peruse the findings of the new Collins dictionary and the OED online supplement, though, is immediately to realise that a game previously conducted at a snail's pace by Murray and his descendants has increased its tempo. The dictionary of the future, it seems safe to predict, will function as a continual online touching-up of the linguistic portrait, rather than something entombed between hard covers every decade or so. Significantly, perhaps, a new printed edition of the Oxford English Dictionary is not planned until 2015.
However gratifying the sight of all this expertise, enthusiasm - some might say pedantry - at work, one sometimes wants to ask whether it brings us any closer to the fundamental question of what people mean when they say certain things and the intricate layers of allusion that can surround stock phrases. "Reckon I will," people in Norfolk will pronounce, when they don't want to do something. But "reckon I will" isn't simply ironic; it has its own twists and ambiguities. It doesn't mean: "I will not do what you have proposed." It does not even go a stage further and mean: "You must be very stupid if you assume I will do what you have proposed." What it means (approximately) is: "Our intimacy is such that you know already that I will not do what you have proposed. Therefore, by proposing it, you have given me the opportunity to make a joke at my expense, but also at your expense, because it indicates the futility of your asking me to do anything which I do not want to do."
It is this kind of inquiry, you feel, that lies at the heart of what language consists, rather than the ritual squawking noises about "FAQs", "planet Zogs" and the host of other neologisms which will be out of date almost from the moment they are coined.
How the internet is changing language
By Zoe KleinmanTechnology reporter, BBC News (August 16, 2010)
'To Google' has become a universally understood verb and many countries are developing their own internet slang. But is the web changing language and is everyone up to speed?
The web is a hub of neologisms
In April 2010 the informal online banter of the internet-savvy collided with the traditional and austere language of the court room.
Christopher Poole, founder of anarchic image message board 4Chan, had been called to testify during the trial of the man accused of hacking into US politician Sarah Palin's e-mail account.
During the questioning he was asked to define a catalogue of internet slang that would be familiar to many online, but which was seemingly lost on the lawyers.
At one point during the exchange, Mr Poole was asked to define "rickrolling".
"Rickroll is a meme or internet kind of trend that started on 4chan where users - it's basically a bait and switch. Users link you to a video of Rick Astley performing Never Gonna Give You Up," said Mr Poole.
"And the term "rickroll" - you said it tries to make people go to a site where they think it is going be one thing, but it is a video of Rick Astley, right?," asked the lawyer.
"Yes."
"He was some kind of singer?"
"Yes."
"It's a joke?"
"Yes."
The internet prank was just one of several terms including "lurker", "troll" and "caps" that Mr. Poole was asked to explain to a seemingly baffled court.
But that is hardly a surprise, according to David Crystal, honorary professor of linguistics at the University of Bangor, who says that new colloquialisms spread like wildfire amongst groups on the net.
"The internet is an amazing medium for languages," he told BBC News.
"Language itself changes slowly but the internet has speeded up the process of those changes so you notice them more quickly."
People using word play to form groups and impress their peers is a fairly traditional activity, he added.
"It's like any badge of ability, if you go to a local skatepark you see kids whose expertise is making a skateboard do wonderful things.
"Online you show how brilliant you are by manipulating the language of the internet."
Super slang
One example of this is evident in Ukraine, where a written variation of the national tongue has sprung up on internet blogs and message boards called "padronkavskiy zhargon" - in which words are spelled out phonetically.