William the Conqueror sez "What?"

This BBC story has reminded me why I refused to study linguistics in any shape or form while doing a modern languages degree. It may seem a counter-intuitive decision but one day I stumbled into the library to find a friend writing an essay on “The Importance of the Mute E in French”. She didn’t seem to resent the imposition: I, on the other hand, stamped my feet and snorted like a furious carthorse. Life was, and is, too short to warrant an in-depth discussion of the value of the letter “e”, mute or otherwise. She got a First; I got a 2:2. I still think I made the right choice.

A few years on and a couple of miles down the road, researchers at Reading University believe they know which are the oldest words in the English language. This should be very exciting – an anthropological breakthrough, an insight into where we came from! – but these guys reduce it to a computer model that tracks the rate of change of words, giving us a lexicon of two hundred words that are not specific to culture and technology and therefore stick around whatever happens. According to Professor Mark Pagel, an evolutionary biologist at the University, “From that list you can derive a phrasebook of words you could use if you tried to show up and talk to, for example, William the Conqueror.” “I”, “we”, “two” and “three” are the top four. It’s all very worthy but not exactly riveting: the Norman king would have understood the same concepts expressed through basic rhyme. This is what happens when language is broken down to algorithms.

Even worse, “dirty”, “squeeze” and “guts” are on their way out, which begs the question: What are crime writers going to do?