Most all words replaced in 2000 years

August 25th, 02007 by Alexander Rose - Twitter: @zander

This is a great appendix I just came across on the half life of vocabulary in a language. From the text:

The rate of vocabulary change The half-life of a word is the amount of time required for there to be a 50% chance that it will be replaced by a new word. Most words have a half-life of 2,000 years. However, a small number of words have a half-life of greater than 10,000 years. This shows that despite the fast average pace of language evolution, some meanings, like highly-conserved genes, evolve at a slow rate. The y axis in the graphic is the number out of a sample of 200 meanings. (ref. 1)

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 25th, 02007 at 6:27 pm and is filed under Long Term Thinking, Rosetta.

  • http://showerinthedark.blogspot.com/ Stephanie Gerson

    Is there a pattern associated with which words last shorter or longer? The appendix didn’t reference one, but it might be interesting to speculate…

  • Nikolay

    How are these numbers estimated? I.e. is it a computer model, and where did they found a meaning of word 10000 ago. I can’t remember any writing system that existed then.

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