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From New York City, this is Lexicon Valley, a podcast about language.

I'm John McWhorter.

I teach linguistics at Columbia University.

And this week I'm going solo.

And what we're going to explore is the world's first language.

There's a story in the news this week about how we're still supposedly using some

words that cavemen were using, and people have been writing me, asking me whether that idea

holds up. Well, it depends. We're talking about a new study by Mark Pagel, Quentin, Atkinson,

the long-suffering. He's always putting forth

these theories that linguists jump all over, Andrea Calude and Andrew Mead. And what this

study's getting at is that most words, as a language goes through this veil of tears called

time, get substituted for by other ones.

Most words leach out and get replaced by something else.

Some don't.

On the ones that get substituted for, an example would be that English king from the 11th century.

We now call him Avalrad the unready, because his name in old

English was Avalrad the Unrad. But actually, rad meant advice in old English. And so Unrad meant he was

unguided, not that he wasn't ready, which is something different. There was a word rad, and it was

replaced as time went by by other words like counsel and advice. That's the typical story.

...