'Time Machine' for Reconstructing Ancient Languages Invented

Computer scientists have reconstructed ancient Proto-Austronesian, which gave rise to languages spoken in Polynesia, among other places (UC Berkeley)

Researchers have created a technological system to quickly reconstruct primitive languages that formed the root of this cycle of humankind.

With 85 percent accuracy, the computer model can reconstruct more than 600 primitive languages (‘Proto-Austronesian”) from an existing database of more than 140,000 words, according to the University of California, Berkeley.

”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,” said Dan Klein, an associate professor of computer science at UC Berkeley, in the announcement.

Reconstructing a language can take years manually; now it will take days or even hours, say the researchers.

“Not only will this program speed up the ability of linguists to rebuild the world’s proto-languages on a large scale, boosting our understanding of ancient civilizations based on their vocabularies, but it can also provide clues to  how languages might change years from now.

‘Our statistical model can be used to answer scientific questions about languages over time, not only to make inferences about the past, but also to extrapolate how language might change in the future,” said Tom Griffiths, associate professor of psychology, director of UC Berkeley’s Computational Cognitive Science Lab.’”

Although UC Berkeley’s interpretation of human cycles is wrong—the researchers claim that the earliest written records date back less than 6,000 years, when many understand by now that that was merely the earliest records of this cycle of human civilization (Ancient India, anyone?)—this model could enable us to learn more about the earlier human beings in this cycle.

Proto-Austronesian “genealogical tree” (UC Berkeley)

Using linguistic theory that is based on the idea of words evolving along the branch of a family tree, the ancient languages are, in some cases, thought to share a common mother tongue.