Words, Words, Words

[Jim Koepke]

Interesting story about the Oxford English Dictionary in the news.

For those not familiar the OED includes information on first known uses of words in print and the sentence in which it was used with source citations.

It now appears one of the sources, Meanderings of Memory from 1852, can not be found. It was used as the original source on about 47 words in the OED.

There is much speculation about this including things about the source not existing (fabricated just to coin a few new words) to its being pornographic.

Interesting read:

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2013/05/oxford-english-dictionary-mystery-meanderings-of-memory.html

jtk

[Stephen Cherry]

That's pretty interesting. I enjoy reading about the development of people, and their languages. (Only at the Wikipedia level)

One thing about languages is that most of the development will be lost to history. I was watching a BBC show on India, and the people and their languages, and it had a segment about a group in India who have an oral tradition of ritual chants; the linguists studied this and their best guess is that it is an animal sound, perhaps pre dating the development of human language.