Some of the oldest words in English have been identified, scientists say.
科學家們相信，他們找到了英文中最古老的文字。

Reading University researchers claim "I", "we", "two" and "three" are among the most ancient, dating back tens of thousands of years.
雷丁大學的研究人員認為，“我”、“我們”、“二”和“三”是英文中最古老的詞匯，它們的歷史可以追溯到四萬年前。

Their computer model analyses the rate of change of words in English and the languages that share a common heritage.
科研人員們通過一個計算機模型，對英文詞匯變化和消失的幾率進行了分析測算，并展現出語言的普遍發展歷程。

The team says it can predict which words are likely to become extinct--citing "squeeze", "guts", "stick" and "bad" as probable first casualties.
研究預測，“擠”、“膽量”、“木棍”和“壞”將很可能成為最先被廢棄和絕跡的詞匯。

"We use a computer to fit a range of models that tell us how rapidly these words evolve," said Mark Pagel, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Reading.
雷丁大學進化生物學家馬克?佩格爾說：“我們利用計算機模型測算出這些詞的發展速率。”

At the root of the Reading University effort is a lexicon of 200 words that is not specific to culture or technology, and is therefore likely to represent concepts that have not changed across nations or millennia.
雷丁大學的研究進行的基礎是一個包含約200個詞匯的詞匯庫，庫中的詞匯大多是一些表達人類對事物共同感知、不易因習俗和科技而改變的詞，而非那些隨著科技和時代進步應運而生的新詞。

"We have lists of words that linguists have produced for us that tell us if two words in related languages actually derive from a common ancestral word," said Professor Pagel.
佩格爾教授說：“我們開發這個詞匯庫首先需要讓語言學專家來告訴我們，不同語系的兩個詞匯是否會存在一個共同的出處。”

"We have descriptions of the ways we think words change and their ability to change into other words, and those descriptions can be turned into a mathematical language," he added.
佩格爾教授補充說道：“我們掌握了詞匯改變以及它們轉變成其它詞匯的信息，之后我們把這些信息轉變成數學語言。”

What the researchers found was that the frequency with which a word is used relates to how slowly it changes through time, so that the most common words tend to be the oldest ones.
研究人員還發現，詞匯的使用頻率和其生命力緊密相關，越是普通的詞匯，存在的時間也越長久。

For example, the words "I" and "who" are among the oldest, along with the words "two", "three", and "five". The word "one" is only slightly younger.
比如，“我”、“誰”、“二”、“三”和“五”的歷史就非常久遠，而“一”則略微年輕一點。

The word "four" experienced a linguistic evolutionary leap that makes it significantly younger in English and different from other Indo-European languages.
英文數字“四”由于經歷過一次語言上的進化過程，所以更為年輕一些，它和其它歐印語種的發音也大為不同。

Meanwhile, the fastest-changing words are projected to die out and be replaced by other words much sooner.
與之相比，變化速度越快的詞匯，消亡以及被其它詞匯取代的速度也越快。

For example, "dirty" is a rapidly changing word; currently there are 46 different ways of saying it in the Indo-European languages, all words that are unrelated to each other. As a result, it is likely to die out soon in English, along with "stick" and "guts".
例如，“臟”就是一個變化迅速的詞匯，歐印語系中表達“臟”的方式共有46種，而且每種聽上去都很不相同。所以，這個詞和“木棍”、“膽量”一樣，很可能很快就在英文中消失。

"If you've ever played 'Chinese whispers', what comes out the end is usually gibberish. Yet our language can somehow retain its fidelity," Professor Pagel said.
佩格爾教授說：“玩過‘傳話’游戲的人都知道，同樣的一句話從第一個人傳到最后一個人時通常已經面目全非了。由此看來，語言對我們還是很忠誠的。”

（來源：網絡 英語點津Jennifer編輯）

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