In deciding what I could write about this month, I came across an interesting.
Now what I’m about to say sounds like something from the book, The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, but this is not fiction. The IBM supercomputer at the University of Reading, known as ThamesBlue, has been around for more than a decade now. Before it arrived, it took an average of six weeks to perform a computational task such as comparing two sets of words in different languages, now these same tasks can be executed in a few hours.
And what did scientists discover?
They discovered that 'I', 'we', 'who' and the numbers '1', '2' and '3' are amongst the oldest words, not only in English, but across all Indo-European languages.
The Indo-European languages are most of those originally found across Europe, the Middle-East and the Indian subcontinent. Examples include Celtic, Roman, Greek, Germanic, Nordic (with the exception of Finnish), Slavic, Armenian, Iranian, Afghan, Gujarati, Hindi, Bengali, Napali and Kashmiri, modern-day derivations such as English and Spanish.
Researchers call words that persist relatively untouched across the ages 'cognates’. The most resilient cognates, the numerals, have not changed significantly in their entire history.
Pretty cool stuff, eh?
Now what I’m about to say sounds like something from the book, The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, but this is not fiction. The IBM supercomputer at the University of Reading, known as ThamesBlue, has been around for more than a decade now. Before it arrived, it took an average of six weeks to perform a computational task such as comparing two sets of words in different languages, now these same tasks can be executed in a few hours.
And what did scientists discover?
They discovered that 'I', 'we', 'who' and the numbers '1', '2' and '3' are amongst the oldest words, not only in English, but across all Indo-European languages.
The Indo-European languages are most of those originally found across Europe, the Middle-East and the Indian subcontinent. Examples include Celtic, Roman, Greek, Germanic, Nordic (with the exception of Finnish), Slavic, Armenian, Iranian, Afghan, Gujarati, Hindi, Bengali, Napali and Kashmiri, modern-day derivations such as English and Spanish.
Researchers call words that persist relatively untouched across the ages 'cognates’. The most resilient cognates, the numerals, have not changed significantly in their entire history.
Pretty cool stuff, eh?
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