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June 7, 2013

Strange But True!

Q. If your descendants thousands of years from now happen to discover some of your writing, will they be able to read the text?

A. Many of the words will likely be incomprehensible, even if the people call themselves “speakers of English,” says David Robson in New Scientist magazine. After all, we struggle to read texts such as “Beowulf” from just 1,000 years ago. Certainly English is in constant flux, as The Oxford English Dictionary adds 2,000-2,500 words every year, according to one of its editors. Moreover, many grammatical rules are shifting; for example, irregular verbs that are not used frequently are more likely to become regular verbs, changing their past tenses. According to Erez Lieberman Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel of Harvard University, there is a 50 percent chance that “slunk” will become “slinked” within 300 years. “To be” or “to have,” used in about one in 10 sentences, have “half-lives” of nearly 40,000 years (the journal Nature). The more common words are, the longer they tend to linger.


 
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