== Structure exposes the evolutionary roots of language ==

01 October 2005
From issue 2519 of New Scientist magazine, 01 October 2005, page 15
http://www.newscientist.com/channel/being-human/mg18825195.200

LANGUAGE structure may reveal more about human origins than vocabulary.
Traditional techniques for studying the history of languages have relied on
evolutionary trees based on word-type, but the speed at which lexicons change
means such techniques cannot look further back than 10,000 years.

Now Michael Dunn and colleagues at the Max Planck Institute of
Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, Netherlands, have developed a new approach. They
built a database of 125 structural language features, such as where verbs
appear in clauses. They then used computational cladistics - a technique
usually used to classify organisms based on evolutionary relationships - to
analyse different languages in terms of these features and classify them into
their evolutionary groups.

The team first looked at a set of 16 Austronesian languages whose histories
were already well known via comparative vocabulary methods. The structural
method produced the same historical connections, indicating that the technique
was reliable.

They then analysed a set of 15 Papuan languages that had previously show no
historical connections, and discovered structural similarities (Science, vol
309, p 2072). This suggests the new technique can reach further back than
10,000 years, says Russell Gray, an expert in language evolution at the
University of Auckland, New Zealand, in an article accompanying the paper.