When you speak, the words you speak are very old.
Even the new words in your vocabulary are ancient.
constructed as they are from bits of much older words.
The halves of the 1975 microchip date back eight millennia.
All words belong to a family of primordial sounds.
The primal sound ‘nyoo’ echoes in ‘new,’ ‘knew,’ and ‘gnu.’
Remove the ‘n’ and we add: threw, screw, brew, queue,
do, mew, Sioux, rue, slew, blew, blue, shoe, glue, pew,
In lieu of the numeral 2 we have two, plus to, and too.
So the next time you are asked if you speak ancient languages,
answer, “quite a few.” It’s true.
Okay, I’m through.