News, British scientists uncover oldest words in English.

[Mathguy]

Originally Posted by John1960

LONDON (AFP) – The oldest words in the English language include "I" and "who", while words like "dirty" could die out relatively quickly, British researchers said Thursday.

Scientists at Reading University in southern England have used a supercomputer called ThamesBlue to model the evolution of words in English and the wider family of Indo-European languages over the last 30,000 years.

British scientists uncover oldest words in English

Well, my money was on "Die French Swine"...lol

[Senor Boogie Woogie]

Modern English has only been around for the past 600 years or so.

Old English, the language spoken about 1100 AD had differnent word forms, basically a language that a modern English speaker could not recognize.

Example:

Ic nam me to gemynde þa gewritu and þa word, þe se arcebiscop Lyfing me fram þam papan brohte of Rome, þæt ic scolde æghwær godes lof upp aræran and unriht alecgan and full frið wyrcean be ðære mihte, þe me god syllan wolde.

The words are in order, but one has to know the meaning of the word.

[Trudy Rose]

Will you please translate that for us???

[Fred314X]

As you see, Old English also had a couple of additional letters. For the record, they were called edh and thorne.

[6 FOOT 3]

However we can see that ''old english'' numerals are quasi simular to todays english numerals.

one - an
two - twa
three - prie
four - feower
five - fif
six - siex
seven - seofan
eight - eahta
nine - nigon
ten - tien
eleven - enleofan
twelve - twelf
fifteen - fiftiene
twenty - twentig
one hundred - hund
one thousand - pusend

[Cliffie]

I'm always intrigued by the way a minority language from the upper-lower part of a mid-sized island on the far edge of a continent became the lingua franca all over the world.

An English prof once told me that if all the world's literary history were compressed into a single year, written English would not have been invented until 30 seconds before the stroke of midnight on New Year's Eve -- and yet we have one of the richest literary histories on earth.

[6 FOOT 3]

I think we could give some ''kudos'' to King Edward III the Grandson of King Edward I or Longshanks (Braveheart fame) who insisted the the lingua franca of England go back to being english as french was spoken in all the official government affairs for about 300 years since William the Conqueror even though the general public spoke english.

Even though he was bilingual (spoke both english and french) Edward wanted to reunite the motherland with it's mother tongue as he pushed forward the ''Pleading in English'' act in 1362 to Parliament that stipulated that all the courts and other government business to be conducted in english and was the first Monarch ever to address Parliament in english and not french.

Just thought i'd pass that along .

[Antlered Chamataka]

Originally Posted by John Walmsley

What is the origin of zero?

Zero is from India. Arab merchants brought it out for the rest of the world.