Pushing the Time Barrier in the Quest for Language Roots
- 23 September 2005
- journal article
- editorial
- Published by American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Science
- Vol. 309 (5743) , 2007-2008
- https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1119276
Abstract
The challenge of tracing the history of the world's languages faces a serious problem--words change far too rapidly to reveal deep historical links. In his Perspective, Gray discusses language analyses by Dunn et al. in which a database of structural linguistic features was created and computational methods derived from evolutionary biology were applied. The approach offers new hope for uncovering these ancient connections.Keywords
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