Ancient languages reconstructed by computer program
12 February 2013 Last updated at 07:18 ET
By Rebecca Morelle Science reporter, BBC World Service
... 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 ...
Dan Klein, an associate professor at the University of California, Berkeley, said: "It's very time consuming for humans to look at all the data. There are thousands of languages in the world, with thousands of words each, not to mention all of those languages' ancestors ... " ...
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 ...
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-21427896
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