THE Washington Post reports today that linguists have discovered a handful of "ultraconserved" words, some 15,000 years old. These are said to include "hand", "give", "bark" and "ash". The paper is ...

A study on Indo-European languages, using direct linguistic data, reconciles the two dominant hypotheses of where and how ...

Imagine the wealth of knowledge we could uncover if it was possible to travel back in time and re-construct ancient languages. While that’s impossible right now, scientists at UC Berkley and the ...

A new linguistic study sheds light on the nature of languages spoken before the written period, using computational modeling to reconstruct the grammar of the 6500-7000 year-old Proto-Indo-European ...

Ancient languages hold a treasure trove of information about the culture, politics and commerce of millennia past. Yet, reconstructing them to reveal clues into human history can require decades of ...

Bronze drove the economy and mining was a recognised profession. Huge volumes of tin, copper and finished bronze articles moved along the continent’s trade routes, both terrestrial and maritime. Other ...

How do we know what ancient Egyptian sounded like, or Old English? Linguistics gives us the tools to reconstruct lost languages from the words we speak today. Here’s how it’s done. The most important ...