LANGUAGE structure may reveal more about human origins than vocabulary. Traditional techniques for studying the history of languages have relied on evolutionary trees based on word-type, but the speed at which lexicons change means such techniques cannot look further back than 10,000 years.
Now Michael Dunn and colleagues at the Max Planck Institute of Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, Netherlands, have developed a new approach. They built a database of 125 structural language features, such as where verbs appear in clauses. They then used computational cladistics – a technique usually used to classify organisms based on evolutionary relationships – to analyse…
