What form did the first human language take? According to some linguists, all known languages descend from a proto-language, perhaps dating back to the first behaviourally modern humans 50,000 years ago. But little else is known about how our ancestors spoke.
Now two maverick linguists say they have clues. of Stanford University in California, and Murray Gell-Mann, at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico created a family tree for 2200 languages, living and dead, based on how they use similar sounds for the same meanings. Most modern languages use subject-verb-object sentences: 鈥淚 see the dog鈥�, while most dead ones, such as Latin, go subject-object-verb 鈥� 鈥淚 the dog see鈥�.
On Ruhlen and Gell-Mann鈥檚 tree, subject-verb-object languages always descend from subject-object-verb languages, but never the other way around. 鈥淭his tells us that the putative ancestral language had subject-object-verb word order,鈥� says Ruhlen. However, mainstream linguists are dubious about the tree鈥檚 validity.
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Journal reference: , DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1113716108
