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The oldest words in any language are among the most basic and profound words we know, according to new research from Britain.

As one might expect with humans, 'I'; is first among them. So is 'who,' as well as the numbers two, three and five, which date back approximately 10,000 years to a time when humans were just moving beyond a primitive hunting and gathering existence. The number one, which seems so essential to everyday speech, actually evolved more recently than the others, according to Mark Pagel, an evolutionary language scientist at Reading University.

He used sophisticated computer modelling to study the transformation of vocabulary in the Indo-European language group, which includes most of the languages spoken across Europe, the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent.

His study predicts that certain words are likely to disappear in time, just as they have been doing for thousands of years.

"Fifty per cent of the words we use today would be unrecognizable to our ancestors living 2,500 years ago," he said. “If a time traveller came to us and told us he wanted to go back to that period, we could arm him with the appropriate phrase book and hopefully keep him out of trouble.”

He predicts that “dirty” is the word most likely to be scrubbed from the English language in the next 750 years.

“It has been replaced throughout the history of Indo-European languages by other words that mean the same thing at a higher rate than any other word. We can predict that in the future that word will be replaced by some other word,” he told the BBC.

Words that are seldom used are the ones most threatened by extinction, he said.

“The frequency with which some words are used in our everyday speech is a strong predictor of whether they'll be retained. Words we use a lot tend to be highly conserved,” Prof. Pagel said.

Numerals change only slowly, followed by pronouns, nouns, verbs, adjectives and conjunctions, which are the most volatile. Words such as “and” or “but” evolve 100 times more quickly than numerals, according to the study.

A word such as ‘throw” is described as having a half-life of more than 900 years, but, since there are 42 unrelated words for it across the various Indo-European languages, it is likely to eventually be replaced in 10 of those languages by the year 3,000. Words such as “squeeze,” “guts” and “stick” are also headed for the scrap heap, Prof. Pagel said.

The research was done using an IBM supercomputer that matched the words in various languages with the time period of their use. Many words with similar meanings in different languages share common sounds, such as the word water in English, wasser in German and vaten in Swedish, which all share a common sound. Using that kind of information as a starting point, they were able to trace words back to common roots and map their evolution.

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ENDURING OR EVOLVING

Scientists at Britain's Reading University have used a supercomputer called ThamesBlue to model the evolution of words in English and identify the most enduring, and the most at risk of fading into disuse.

The oldest words, resistant to evolution:

I

who

we

thou

two

three

five

Words that are evolving rapidly, and likely to disappear:

dirty

squeeze

bad

because

guts

push VERB

smell VERB

stab

stick NOUN

turn VERB

wipe