New Methodology on Analysis of Language Change

I ran across this last night. Does anyone know any more about the
specifics of this and the methodology employed?

Evolutionary Tools Help Unlock Origins of Ancient Languages
Scientific American - 9/23/05

The key to understanding how languages evolved may lie in their structure,
not their vocabularies, a new report suggests. Findings published today in
the journal Science indicate that a linguistic technique that borrows some
features from evolutionary biology tools can unlock secrets of languages
more than 10,000 years old.

Because vocabularies change so quickly, using them to trace how languages
evolve over time can only reach back about 8,000 to 10,000 years. To study
tongues from the Pleistocene, the period between 1.8 million and 10,000
years ago, Michael Dunn and his colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for
Psycholinguistics developed a computer program that analyzes language based
on how words relate to one another. They developed a database containing
125 "structural language features," which include traits such as verb
placement within clauses, for two sets of languages. Sixteen Austronesian
languages made up the first set; the second was composed of 15 Papuan
languages. (The image above shows an outrigger sailing canoe in a region
where languages from the two sets are spoken. Called Island Melanesia, it
is east of Papua New Guinea and northeast of Australia.) When the
researchers used the new approach to reveal historical connections between
languages, the results for the Austronesian languages closely resembled
previous results that were based on vocabulary.
In contrast, the vocabulary-based method could not yield results for the
Papuan languages but the novel technique did. It suggests that the
languages are related in ways that are consistent with geographic
relationships between them. In an accompanying commentary, Russell Gray of
the University of Auckland in New Zealand cautions that the new technique
still has uncertainty. But he contends that the approach "is likely to be
widely emulated by researchers working on languages in other regions. In
the future we may see the development of Web-based databases for the
languages of the world. "


Joe Murphy
Boy Linguist
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Related languages (Re: A China-Sumer connection)
    ... it seems as though the main criteria for classifying languages ... He points out that linguists use ... similarities in vocabularies to determine relations, ... enough table, then if two languages offer regular sound correspondences, you ...
    (sci.anthropology)
  • Re: Related languages (Re: A China-Sumer connection)
    ... it seems as though the main criteria for classifying languages ... He points out that linguists use ... similarities in vocabularies to determine relations, ... enough table, then if two languages offer regular sound correspondences, you ...
    (sci.lang)
  • limbismul - structuri !
    ... The structure of languages may reveal more about their roots than their ... languages by comparing their vocabularies. ... Their new structural method produced the same historical connections ... evolution of language at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, in an ...
    (soc.culture.romanian)
  • Evolutionary Tools Help Unlock Origins of Ancient Languages
    ... Evolutionary Tools Help Unlock Origins of Ancient Languages ... Because vocabularies change so quickly, using them to trace how languages ...
    (soc.culture.african.american)
  • Re: Bilingualism has ruined Canada but there is still hope.
    ... And if one of the languages I ... don't have vocabularies that don't correspond to one another (if, ... quantum physics) then it is logically impossible to be bilingual in ... learned English before you learned quantum physics, ...
    (sci.lang)