Now two maverick linguists say they have clues. Merritt Ruhlen of Stanford University in California, and Murray Gell-Mann, at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico created a family tree for 2200 languages, living and dead, based on how they use similar sounds for the same meanings. Most modern languages use subject-verb-object sentences: "I see the dog", while most dead ones, such as Latin, go subject-object-verb – "I the dog see".
On Ruhlen and Gell-Mann's tree, subject-verb-object languages always descend from subject-object-verb languages, but never the other way around. "This tells us that the putative ancestral language had subject-object-verb word order," says Ruhlen. However, mainstream linguists are dubious about the tree's validity."
By Debora MacKenzie/New Scientist
No comments:
Post a Comment