Language ‘mutations’ affect least-used words

Linguistics

12:24 11 October 2007 by Bob Holmes

As languages evolve over centuries and millennia, the most frequently used words tend to remain unaltered, while rarer words are more likely to change.

This tendency was long suspected, but has now been proven rigorously for the first time by two new studies. The results show that the tools of evolutionary biology can be applied to study the evolution of cultural artefacts like language.

Evolutionary biologist Mark Pagel and his colleagues at the University of Reading, UK, used a comparative database of Indo-European languages to trace the words used to express 200 different meanings in 87 different languages.

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Boom! Hok! A Monkey Language Is Deciphered, New York Times 8/12/2009

English Language, Language
By NICHOLAS WADE

Boom boom! (I’m here, come to me!)

Krak krak! (Watch out, a leopard!)

Hok hok hok! (Hey, crowned eagle!)

Very good — you have already mastered half the basic vocabulary of the Campbell’s monkey, a fellow primate that lives in the forests of the Tai National Park in Ivory Coast. The adult males have six types of call, each with a specific meaning, but they can string two or more calls together into a message with a different meaning.

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Erin McKean, a keen lexicographer

English Language, Language

While browsing through the TED videos I came across this lovely, full of spank and enthusiasm lexicographer. After that I was hooked! I became such a fan that I thought that I could, maybe, gather in this post all the Erin McKean videos I could find online. This most certainly will not be an exhaustive list but I am sure if you watch even a couple of them you will become a fan and at the same time will see your dictionaries from a whole new perspective.

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