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哪些是英语中最古老的词汇? |
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作者:soosun 文章来源:本站原创 点击数: 更新时间:2009-3-3 |
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哪些是英语中最古老的词汇? Reading University researchers claim "I", "we", "two" and "three" are among the most ancient, dating back tens of thousands of years. Their computer model analyses the rate of change of words in English and the languages that share a common heritage. The team says it can predict which words are likely to become extinct--citing "squeeze", "guts", "stick" and "bad" as probable first casualties. "We use a computer to fit a range of models that tell us how rapidly these words evolve," said Mark Pagel, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Reading. At the root of the Reading University effort is a lexicon of 200 words that is not specific to culture or technology, and is therefore likely to represent concepts that have not changed across nations or millennia. "We have lists of words that linguists have produced for us that tell us if two words in related languages actually derive from a common ancestral word," said Professor Pagel. "We have descriptions of the ways we think words change and their ability to change into other words, and those descriptions can be turned into a mathematical language," he added. What the researchers found was 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. For example, the words "I" and "who" are among the oldest, along with the words "two", "three", and "five". The word "one" is only slightly younger. The word "four" experienced a linguistic evolutionary leap that makes it significantly younger in English and different from other Indo-European languages. Meanwhile, the fastest-changing words are projected to die out and be replaced by other words much sooner. For example, "dirty" is a rapidly changing word; currently there are 46 different ways of saying it in the Indo-European languages, all words that are unrelated to each other. As a result, it is likely to die out soon in English, along with "stick" and "guts". "If you've ever played 'Chinese whispers', what comes out the end is usually gibberish. Yet our language can somehow retain its fidelity," Professor Pagel said. 实践证明经常访问无忧英语教育网 www.51education.net ,能迅速提高你的英语学习能力!积沙成塔,不断提高! 本站所提供的所有信息仅供学校课堂教学及英语学习者学习研究之用,其著作权归原作者及媒体所有。 |
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文章录入:soosun 责任编辑:51education |
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