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Amira to Amira's feed, Translation & Language, Linguistics, History
Ancient languages reconstructed by computer program - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news...
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"Researchers have created software that can rebuild protolanguages - the ancient tongues from which our modern languages evolved. To test the system, the team took 637 languages currently spoken in Asia and the Pacific and recreated the early language from which they descended. (...) Over thousands of years, tiny variations in the way that we produce sounds have meant that early languages have morphed into many different descendents. Dr Klein explains: "These sound changes are almost always regular, with similar words changing in similar ways, so patterns are left that a human or a computer can find. "The trick is to identify these patterns of change and then to 'reverse' them, basically evolving words backwards in time." (...)" - Amira
"From a database of 142,000 words, the system was able to recreate the early language from which these modern tongues derived. The scientists believe it would have been spoken about 7,000 years ago. They then compared the computer's findings to those of linguists, finding that 85% of the early words that the software presented were within one "character" - or sound - of the words that the language experts had identified. (...) "Our system still has shortcomings. For example, it can't handle morphological changes or re-duplications - how a word like 'cat' becomes 'kitty-cat'. "At a much deeper level, our system doesn't explain why or how certain changes happened, only that they probably did happen." - Amira
Once the *recursive* features of language evolution are deduced, one can chain forward from the present (cf. prediction in physics), as well as simulate back to initial conditions (e.g. stochastic MCMC). By relying on probabilistic models of sound change, the authors zoom past symbolic representations of languages. My guess for first ever uttered sound: "Duh!" (maybe "wut" :-) - Adriano