A Rosetta Stone For Ancient Protolanguages
Monday, February 11, 2013 - 20:50
in Paleontology & Archaeology
A group has created a new computer system that can quickly reconstruct protolanguages, the rudimentary ancient tongues from which modern languages evolved. And their tool is already 85 percent as accurate as the manual reconstructions performed by expert linguists, they write in PNAS. Protolanguages are reconstructed by grouping words with common meanings from related modern languages, analyzing common features, and then applying sound-change rules and other criteria to derive the common parent. The new tool designed by Bouchard-Côté and colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley analyzes sound changes at the level of basic phonetic units, and can operate at much greater scale than previous computerized tools. read more