The fewer words the faster the

Scientists have discovered an evolutionary law of language: The more a word is used, the less likely it is to change over time.

Research shows that, like genetic genes, language undergoes a screening pressure to survive only the most appropriate words, and the less commonly used words in everyday life, the more likely it is. Variations.

Coincidentally with the evolutionary theory of Darwin (the initiator of the family tree concept), the new finding also shows how individuals, unconsciously, can change their native language. .

Professor Mark Pagel and colleagues at the University of Reading (UK) applied mathematical accuracy to four different languages ​​of the Indo-European system. They explored the differentiation of 200 basic words in English, Russian, Greek and Spanish after thousands of years. Like in evolutionary biology, the whole 87 languages ​​of the Indo-European language today are considered to originate from a common language about 10,000 years ago.

The team found very familiar words such as " water - " or " two - two " still have a link that could be seen on such a wide spectrum of language.

However, other words are less common in everyday communication, even when they are clear, they change drastically over the centuries and millennia. Some people who speak English will be hard to guess right away that the word 'oupa' in Greek, 'Schwanz' in German or 'queue' in French has the same meaning as 'tail - in English ' .

And a similar result

In a parallel study published in Nature, Erez Lieberman, an mathematician and evolutionary biologist at Harvard University, explored the change in English verbs over time, especially transformation. of irregular verb words to rule verbs.

In Old English, the verbs of the verb rarely affect specific rules, but gradually these 'irregular' verbs have become standardized.

Lieberman and colleagues studied 177 verb forms, showing the exact relationship between the frequency of word usage and its change. They found that a verb used more than 100 times more than another word was also 10 times slower. Although the two methods of analysis are different, both reports come to the same conclusion: the frequency of words used will resist the change of the word.

However, the solution to this relationship is still unclear. According to the researchers, it is possible that familiar words that are less mutated are because users do not want to be misrepresented when using it, or more simply, we will remember the best words for everyday use.

T. An