Determining the Age of a Word

Question

Apologies in advance for any ignorance, I'm a non-linguist hoping to better understand the methods in the field (if any) to answer a question I have. In particular, I want to know when a word first appeared in a language tree.

For instance, if we take the word "iron," I see that the earliest version in the Wiktionary (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/iron#Etymology) is from Proto-Celtic, derived from the PIE for "blood." So, perhaps I could naively date the word to around 1000 BC, the rough age of Proto-Celtic (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Celtic_language).

My question is what the most proper and formal way to do this is for a large number of words and languages. Should I:

1. Be looking at etymological dictionaries / estimated origin dates for languages?
2. Looking at some computational model conducted at the word level?
3. Give up because we don't know enough to know these sorts of things? Of course, I don't need to know the word appeared on January 12th, 1427 BC. The question is, is there any method that improves beyond naive guesses?

Appreciate very much the help in this area--thanks a lot!

Answer 1

Before trying to figure out how to date a word, you need to first decide how to detect a specific word. Taking the example of "iron", first we have to decide whether to believe the Wiktionary story, versus Calvert Watkins' story (is-(e)ro "powerful, holy"). Either way, it's pretty clear that the word hasn't always meant "iron", so then you have to decide whether you set the birth of the word at the time when the sound-sequence took on the meaning "iron", or do you focus on the sound sequence and discard subtleties of meaning change?

If you want a stricter semantic relationship, i.e. you want to pin it down to the point where the word "iron" took on the meaning ferrum, then words will have a much later "origin". You will also need to sharpen up the theory of meaning-sameness, because the word "chicken" has gone through a number of subtle meaning-changes starting with "young fowl", then specifically "young chicken" and finally "any chicken". Except that "chicken" also includes the meaning "cowardly", thus you need to be clear on whether you are looking for all of the current meanings, or just some of them.

On the other side of the equation is the possibility of tracing a word-qua-pronunciation back in time, so Modern "iron", Old English iren from isærn from isarnan back to 9perhaps is-(e)ro. The problem is that most words ultimately originate from a language for which there are no records and we generally can't say much about when it was spoken, though we can at least know that Proto Indo-European was spoken further in the past than 4,000 years ago. That doesn't mean that the origin of the word is whenever PIE was spoken, it means that the origin of the word was at least that far back, and possibly much further back, it's just that we can't point to specific evidence proving that it had to be older than that.

Of the two approaches, the more semantically-restricted approach is "more practical" because then there is at least a potential empirical question. It makes sense to ask when the word "dog" came to mean dog (a general term, not a specific breed if that is what it used to mean), or when the meaning of "meat" changed to its current "flesh" meaning.

Answer 2

As you already sketched out, it is a difficult question. Usually (e.g., in the OED) the age of a word in a certain language is defined by its first attestation. This works well for the large part of vocabulary that was introduced rather recently.

Only for the core words of the language that are inherited from ancient times, different methods are needed: Reconstructions of proto-languages, time estimates when those proto-languages were presumably spoken, evidence from archaelogical findings (e.g., what technologies, domesticated plants and animals were available at what time) all play a role for dating those words.