BY STEALING tricks from evolutionary genetics, linguists have cast new light on how languages evolved in Europe. They suggest Celtic arrived in Britain around 3200 BC in one wave, rather than two as widely thought.
To track the evolution of Indo-European languages, first spoken in Europe around 8100 BC, Peter Forster of the University of Cambridge and Alfred Toth of the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque charted how a set of 35 words changed over time in bilingual Celtic-Latin inscriptions from a range of regions (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1331158100). “We applied DNA analysis to…
