CONSTANTLY EVOLVING: Two new studies show the words in a language that are used infrequently are subject to change rapidly over time.
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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."
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12 Comments
Add CommentInteresting article, but bad choice of words to illustrate the regularization of formerly irregular words. When I saw the News Scan in Scientific American, I was surprised by the past tense of slink as slinked. Several dictionaries later, including web-based ones, gave slunk as the correct/normal conjugation, even though slinked was mentioned as an alternative in the most recent. In the web-article here, smited is mentioned instead of smote as past tense os smite, which I can't find as the normal word either. I get 3 times more hits on Google with slunk than with slinked, and 9 times more with smote than smited.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHowever, I do recognize the concept of irregular verbs going regular, especially in rarely used words, also in my mother tongue, Danish.
why is what i am typing called modern english?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis result is very interesting. That is similar with the result of the mutation of genetic codes.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe rate of important genes to mutate is much longer than the less used genes or none coding region of the genome.
Both indicate the pattern of the natural principle.
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Edited by Jerome Huang at 12/07/2007 5:51 PM
I was amazed to hear that "1200 years ago" the past tense of "slink" was "slunk." I just asked my fourteen-year-old what the past tense was and the kid (correctly) said, "Slunk."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Slinked" sounds illiterate to me.
I know that languages are constantly changing, but I hate to see irregular verbs disappear (and I still say "throve," "shrank," "sank," "shone," and "lit").
My theory is that irregular verbs have a far harder time in the U.S., where large numbers of inhabitants are descended from recent, non-English-speaking immigrants, and where only a small percentage of the population reads books (where I learned my irregular verbs). In the U.K. the percentage of book-readers may be low too, but most people are descended from ancestors who were native English speakers and presumably once used the old irregular forms themselves.
Likewise, in the Roman empire, I believe the Latin language changed/regularized fastest in areas where large numbers of "barbarians" had to learn Latin quickly.
Somebody is pulling your leg. If you use the words slinked or smited everybody will think you are the village idiot.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisUse it, or it will disappear!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt means that the native languages used by the minority nations will be slaughtered by English or Chinese, that is a great loss of culture. What a pity!
Umm... slunk is still the past tense of slink and smote is still the past tense of smite...! It seems that some others agree with me!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSlinked??? I've never heard it used. Even in paperback mysteries and graphic novels, authors still use "slunk". And because of the wonderful poetry of the Protestant KJV Bible, "smote" is very much with us.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI do not agree with "Bracer" when he or she suggests that Americans are more likely than British people to regularize English irregular verbs. Most British people, I would guess, are completely nonplussed by past tense forms such as "pled" and "dove". However, I have just discussed this point with an Englishwoman who is a scuba-diver. She says that ten years ago "dove" was unknown in the scuba-diving community but has since become quite common. And how about the verb "fit"? I understand that you Americans generally group it with verbs such as "put" and "hit", which do not change in the past tense. We Britons, however, have moved on: we normally say "fitted".
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAnthony Buckley
There's a major difference between speciation in biology and simplification in linguistics! Speciation is the constant branching and evolving new forms, not constantly pruning back to the simplest roots. Having read Orwell's 1984, I often find myself cringing. It feels as if there is a conspiracy in the main-stream media to force-simplify the English language. Though they focus most on simplifying irregular verbs now, how long might it take before we are left with only good and double plus ungood as our choices for adjectives? I constantly change back their simplifications as I read. Irregular verbs are the heart of all languages and should not be banished for the sake of simplicity and easy learning from other languages.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHmmm... Did Harvard only survey American 17-year olds? I've never heard the "since-regularized" forms they cite of "smited" and "slinked." I did however hear a news anchor in Norfolk, Virginia report that a boat "sunk," (I think she meant it sank).
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHi, interesting article.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI found it because I'm trying to find articles talking about the change in meaning of words. I am currently being sued for calling someone a sod...their case being that sod means "gay" and now they're sueing me for defamation!!! Now, I am British, and to me, "sod" means an obnoxious, lothesome person, or an idiot...some dictionaries state something similar as a meaning and some don't. Can anyone help me find some info to help get me out of trouble?!
Thanks :)