New cunning linguist computer has got ancient tongues licked
Boffins build system to reconstruct man's protolanguages
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Boffins have put together a new computer system that attempts to translate protolanguages, the ancient "parent" tongues from which modern languages evolved.
The sophisticated Rosetta Stone-like system can quickly reconstruct the languages of yore from today's vocabularies with 85 per cent accuracy, we're told. The system's designers reckon it can outpace human linguists who painstakingly reconstruct protolanguages from the words we all know and use today.
With the exception of Latin - the parent of the Romance language family* - and a few others, written records of protolanguages tend to be rather rare, forcing experts to analyse modern speech to derive the parent languages. Specifically, linguists group together words with common meanings and study changes in pronunciation, among other techniques.
“We’re hopeful our tool will revolutionise historical linguistics much the same way that statistical analysis and computer power revolutionised the study of evolutionary biology,” said Alexandre Bouchard-Côté, statistics professor at the University of British Columbia and lead author of the study.
“And while our system won’t replace the nuanced work of skilled linguists, it could prove valuable by enabling them to increase the number of modern languages they use as the basis for their reconstructions.”
The new system, designed with help from colleagues at Berkeley, analyses sound-changes at basic phonetic unit level so it can operate at a much greater scale than previous computer tools.
The researchers reconstructed a set of protolanguages from a database of more than 142,000 word forms from 637 Austronesian languages for a study that will be published next week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. ®
* The group includes Spanish, Italian, French, Romanian, Neapolitan, Ladino and many more.
COMMENTS
I just like to offer....
.....my heartiest contrafribularites at the completion of this noble work.
Re: Cunning Linguist - The old ones are the good ones
Really? like C'thulhu?
Re: Etruscan? Basque?
You're missing the point. This program is not meant to decode the meaning of another language, it's supposed (as far as I can tell, anyway) to simulate the evolution of languages in reverse. This won't work on Basque or Etruscan or other language isolates, because they have no common ancestor, or at least none that is attested.
It can, on the other hand, simulate the common ancestor of, e.g., the English hound and the German Hund, but do so far more rapidly, if less accurately, than humans, basically helping us to develop a phylogenetic tree for all related languages and even tentatively reconstruct words from related languages that are now extinct.
Mmmm, Tocharian.
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