A software program that could reconstruct the earliest human languages

Languages are like species . They evolve in mostly predictable ways , splitting into new specie or dying out over time . Now , a group of linguists and computer scientists in the US and Canada have created a piece of software that can analyse tremendous groups of languages to construct what the early human nomenclature might have sounded like . It sounds like a subplot from Neal Stephenson ’s refreshing Snow Crash , but it ’s quite real . By using this program and others like it , linguists may one solar day know how people sounded when they talked 20,000 age ago , long before there was writing .

University of British Columbia mathematical statistician Alexandre Bouchard - Côté begin puzzle out on the programme when he was a graduate student at UC Berkeley . He used common algorithmic rule to compare sounds and cognates — words that are the same in multiple languages — across C of unlike modern languages . By doing this , he could predict which language groups were most related to each other , and which kinds of auditory sensation would preserved most often . A sound that persist the same across distantly - relate languages was probably a phone that subsist early in our linguistic evolutionary Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree .

By putting these sound together , Bouchard - Côté ’s program was able to reconstruct the sounds and word were most likely to have been used in languages from pre - history . Linguists speculate that the spoken communication that lead to today ’s modernistic unity let in Proto - Indo - European , Proto - Afroasiatic and Proto - Austronesian . Bouchard - Côté and his colleagues center on Proto - Austronesia , which led to today ’s Polynesian languages , as well as languages in Southeast Asia and parts of continental Asia . They were able to reconstruct over 600 ancient Proto - Austronesian languages .

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In their newspaper , published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , the investigator write :

We have developed an automatise system capable of large - scale Reconstruction Period of protolanguage word forms , cognate word exercise set , and wakeless modification history . The analysis of the property of hundred of ancient language do by this system goes far beyond the capabilities of any premature automated system and would require signiﬁcant amounts of manual movement by linguist . moreover , the system is in no way restricted to applications like appraise the effect of operable incumbrance : It can be used as a prick to investigate a all-encompassing range of questions about the construction and dynamics of languages .

“ Functional load ” is a mid - twentieth century hypothesis that suggests some sounds are more important than others in a voice communication because they ’re used to distinguish between news that go the same . For example , in the language “ Canis familiaris ” and “ tog , ” there ’s one important strait used to identify between them — it ’s the voicing of the “ d ” . Your tongue is in the same berth to make both letter . The only dispute is that “ d ” ask you to apply your articulation , and “ t ” is just expel melodic phrase . An important audio like that voicing is likely going to be preserve over time , because it ’s used in a deal places to key out between words .

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Ultimately , this programme could allow polyglot to hear nomenclature that have n’t been address in millennia , reconstructing a lost world where those words spread across the world , develop as they went .

Over time , this program could be used for linguistic futurism , too . In a liberation , UC Berkeley cognitive scientist Tom Griffiths said :

Our statistical model can be used to do scientific motion about language over time , not only to make inferences about the past , but also to extrapolate how language might commute in the future .

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