Voices en Español

A language is a living organism. It can grow, shrink or even go extinct depending on a variety of factors that influence its existence. But have you ever stopped to consider the evolution of words? It’s a fascinating field of study.

In the October issue of Nature magazine, there’s an article about the evolutionary process of words. In a nutshell, the more particular words are used in a language, the less they change. To me that seems counterintuitive. I would think that the more a word is used, the more possibilities there would be for the word to mutate, so to speak, and change. But according to new research, it’s just the opposite. Infrequently used words in Indo-European languages (there are over 200 of them, including English and Spanish), actually change and evolve faster than common everyday words. “The easiest way to think about it is that changes to the higher-frequency words are less likely to be accepted,” says Mark Pagel, one of the researchers who teaches at the University of Reading, UK. Think of how much confusion would be caused if people started using different words to express such basic concepts as “one, two, three.” There would be chaos.

It appears that some of the most basic words in a language are the ones slowest to evolve. For example, numbers, interrogatives like who, what, when, how, and basic matierals that help man survive like air, water and fire. Also, words that sound similiar or look similar across different Indo-European languages are an indicator that they once shared a common ancestor and were words resistant to change because of their importance.