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 |  Subject: Language 'time machine' a Rosetta stone for lost tongues  Wed Feb 13, 2013 11:00 am | |
| One of my favorite things about watching old movies is hearing how people might have spoken in eras past -- the expressions they used, their old-school smack talk. But what did the languages from thousands of years back sound like? Hollywood, as far as I know, has yet to make a movie in which characters talk in authentic proto-Austronesian. The language nerd in me, was, therefore, excited to discover that scientists from UC Berkeley and the University of British Columbia have created a computer program to rapidly reconstruct vocabularies of ancient languages using only their modern language descendants. The program, a linguistic time machine of sorts, can quickly crunch data on some of the earliest-known "proto-languages" that gave rise to modern languages such as Hawaiian, Javanese, Malay, Tagalog, and others spoken in Southeast Asia, parts of continental Asia, Australasia, and the Pacific. The speed and scale of the work is key here, as proto-languages are typically reconstructed through a timely and painstaking manual process that involves comparing two or more languages that hail from a shared ancestor. "What excites me about this system is that it takes so many of the great ideas that linguists have had about historical reconstruction, and it automates them at a new scale: more data, more words, more languages, but less time," says Dan Klein, an associate professor of computer science at UC Berkeley and co-author of a paper on the system published this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The program relies on an algorithm known as the Markov chain Monte Carlo sampler to examine hundreds of modern Austronesian languages for words of common ancestry from thousands of years back. The computational model is based on the established linguistic theory that words evolve as if along the branches of a genealogical tree. more here: http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-57569039-1/language-time-machine-a-rosetta-stone-for-lost-tongues/ | |
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