4 ms·

Yes, and this is not trite. Every word we hang on to has special meaning. Think about the amount of words we've forgotten. Could a computational linguist chime

• bradrn 5y ago
  Not a computational linguist (or a linguist at all), but this is an area I know a bit about. The question you ask is at the centre of the study of ‘glottochronology’ [0]: > The original method presumed that the core vocabulary of a language is replaced at a constant (or constant average) rate across all languages and cultures … Unfortunately, the only major discovery glottochronology has revealed is that rates of change vary too much to be of any use: > in Bergsland & Vogt (1962), the authors make an impressive demonstration, on the basis of actual language data verifiable by extralinguistic sources, that the "rate of change" for Icelandic constituted around 4% per millennium, but for closely connected Riksmal (Literary Norwegian), it would amount to as much as 20%. And there are other factors affecting replacement rate as well. For instance, a curious trait about the non-Austronesian languages of New Guinea is that the word ‘louse’ is practically never replaced: it evolves according to normal sound change, but never gets thrown out entirely. By contrast, many languages have a taboo against mentioning the names of the deceased; this can speed up lexical replacement if those people have names homophonous with common words. For these reasons, I suspect that a general answer to your question will be extremely difficult — if not impossible — to find. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glottochronology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glottochronology