Word Concreteness and Word Originality

Abstract

Basque is the oldest known spoken language of Western Europe that is not descended from Indo-European. Despite efforts to stop its use from external influences, the Basque people have shown resiliency throughout their history to keep the language alive. However, as is the case with all other languages, Basque has not been immune to influence from neighboring languages; indeed all Basque speakers are bilingual. The question explored here is whether a word’s concreteness using machine translation from Basque to English and English concreteness scores determines if an original Basque word is spoken today. We find that there is a significant difference of concreteness scores between old and contemporary Basque. We also compared old Basque words with common contemporary Basque words in a semantic vector space and found the old words to cluster more tightly than contemporary words suggesting that words with similar semantic vectors are able to retain usage through time.