 Monthly Archives
Categories
Punctuational bursts of language change
According to research findings released today, the evolution of language parallels evolution of species: The team used a common linguist's tool—a list of 200 everyday words—to create a family tree, or phylogeny, of hundreds of modern languages. These 200 words were presumably all identical in the first language, but changed to new forms over time. Pagel says that he used the words "almost like a set of 200 genes" in which a change to a new form is like a mutation. The research shows that modern languages that have split many times from other languages have accrued more 'mutations', suggesting faster evolution. Pagel speculates that these mutations probably occurred in bursts of change right after the languages split. "What we thought was quite remarkable is that the effect that is causing between a tenth and a third of changes is associated with relatively short periods of time around these splitting events," says Pagel. "We think that it is quite a powerful effect." Tags: evolution, language
|
|||
