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Here we examine the links between ancient Akkadian and modern Hebrew and Arab languages and derive the rate of decay of these Semitic languages. We also examine the links for ancient, hieroglyphic Egyptian and the related modern Coptic. We find that the rates of changes in these language groups are consistent but quite different from those in Indo-European.

Study of the changes of languages over time, called "glottochronology", requires vocabularies for related languages of different, known, dates. Such information is quite abundant for the Indo-European languages and elsewhere in this document we give a detailed analysis of these. Here there is sufficient information to let us establish a date for the beginning of the dispersal of these peoples, an assessment of the homeland location, and a detailed analysis of the sequence of their migration in Europe. The value of the half-life for these Indo-European languages is 2240± 140 years.

Such information is rare for other language groups but, as noted above, we have information on the Semitic languages of ancient Akkadian and modern Hebrew and Arab as well as ancient, hieroglyphic Egyptian and its descendant modern Coptic.

The vocabularies are those used in our (as yet unpublished) study of links between 750 languages worldwide that list names for 100 parts of the body. Here we have found that many two-syllable names that we call "doubles" link all languages. The names for all 100 bodyparts are not found in any language including Akkadian and ancient Egyptian, but there are many instances where more than one name is known for a given bodypart.

We have found 144 Akkadian "doubles", and respectively 18 and 14 of these doubles are found in modern Hebrew and Arab. Statistically these numbers of survivors are the same and thus the average number of modern survivors is 16.

The age of Akkadian is fairly well identified as about 2300 BC or 4300 BP (before the present). The mathematics of exponential decay are given in our companion article on Indo-European and we will not discuss it here, but, in summary we have

Where Lambda is a measure of the decay rate and T is the elapsed time; in other terms, negative (l T) = logarithm (Ratio).

A better known expression of these mathematical relationships is in terms of radioactive decay where the "half-life" is the time for decay to half of an original level and for this case l T is 0.6931.

As noted, the survival ratio from Akkadian to the present day is 16/144 or 0.111, so that l T = 2.197 and for an Akkadian age of 4300, we find that l = 0.000511. This corresponds to a half-life of 0.6931/0.000511 or 1356 years.

Here we have 210 "doubles" names for ancient Egyptian parts of the body taken from the hieroglyphic dictionary of Wallis Budge. There are 17 Coptic survivals that match the 210 ancient names so that the survival Ratio is 17/210. It is not easy to see how to assign a single date to hieroglyphic vocabulary but the Encyclopedia Britannica gives the origin of hieroglyphics as "just before 2925 BC". Using a present date of 2000 AD for Coptic gives an approximate elapsed time of 4925 years.

Thus the survival ratio from Hieroglyphic Egyptian to the present day is 17/210 or 0.08095, so that l T = 2.514 and for an elapsed time of 4925 we find that l = 0.000510. This corresponds to a half-life of 0.6931/0.000511 or 1359 years.

The fact that both the Akkadian and Egyptian data give the same value for the rate of change is convincing evidence that this form of analysis is valid. In fact the remarkably similar values of 1356 and 1359 years for the half-life of the changes is a clear statistical anomaly given the simple statistical uncertainties and less-than-certain dates for the Akkadian and ancient Egyptian vocabularies. The uncertainties in these half-lives from the statistics of the small number of 16 or 17 survivors alone leads to an ambiguity of at least 50 years in these figures and more realistically the uncertainty must be at least twice or three times this minimal estimate.

We conclude that the Akkadian and Egyptian evidence for the rates of change of these two language are in good agreement and the estimated half-life is 1350± 150 years.

We further see that this figure is significantly different from the value of 2240± 140 years derived from our detailed analysis of the well-established Indo-European languages since the differences are well beyond the combined estimated uncertainties in these figures.

We conclude that different language groups may change at quite different rates and that all glottochronological analyses should reflect this fact.

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