Sunday, March 30, 2008
A fast-dying language in remote central Siberia shares a mother tongue with dozens of Native American languages spoken thousands of miles away, new research confirms. The finding may allow linguists to weigh in on how the Americas were first settled, according to Edward Vajda, director of the Center for East Asian Studies at Western Washington University in Bellingham. …
Read the full article at National Geographic
Saturday, February 2, 2008
Language evolves in sudden leaps, according to a statistical study of three major language groups. The finding challenges the slow-and-steady model held by many linguists and matches evidence that genetic evolution follows a similar path. …
Read the full science news article at New Scientist
Tuesday, November 20, 2007
Skilled jade craftsmen may have helped to spread the Austronesian languages. …
Read the full news article at Nature Science News
Saturday, October 27, 2007
Verbs evolve and homogenize at a rate inversely proportional to their prevalence in the English language, according to a formula developed by Harvard University mathematicians who’ve invoked evolutionary principles to study our language over the past 1,200 years, from “Beowulf” to “Canterbury Tales” to “Harry Potter.” …
Read the full news release at Havard University news room
As languages evolve over centuries and millennia, the most frequently used words tend to remain unaltered, while rarer words are more likely to change. This tendency was long suspected, but has now been proven rigorously for the first time by two new studies. The results show that the tools of evolutionary biology can be applied to study the evolution of cultural artefacts like language. …
Read the full news article at New Scientist
Saturday, July 21, 2007
A controversial research project is trying to trace all human language to a common root. … Headed by Nobel Laureate physicist Murray Gell-Mann, the international Evolution of Human Languages (EHL) project is developing a freely accessible etymological database of the world’s languages. Where possible, EHL linguists are attempting to reconstruct – and then compare – ancestor languages, moving ever closer to the first human language. Viewed by many linguists as a fringe movement, the project has attracted much criticism. Many linguists say that historical languages cannot be studied beyond an 8,000-year threshold; they change too much, they say. Some take issue with the project’s methods: A few words shared among reconstructed languages doesn’t prove a familial relationship, they insist, especially far back in time. …
Read the full news article at USA Today
Wednesday, June 20, 2007
For the first time, a text has been found in Old Persian language that shows the written language in use for practical recording and not only for royal display. The text is inscribed on a damaged clay tablet from the Persepolis Fortification Archive, now at the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago. The tablet is an administrative record of the payout of at least 600 quarts of an as-yet unidentified commodity at five villages near Persepolis in about 500 B.C. …
Read the full news article at the University of Chicago news office
Monday, June 18, 2007
The long-running controversy about the origins of the Etruscan people appears to be very close to being settled once and for all, a geneticist will tell the annual conference of the European Society of Human Genetics today. Professor Alberto Piazza, from the University of Turin, Italy, will say that there is overwhelming evidence that the Etruscans, whose brilliant civilisation flourished 3000 years ago in what is now Tuscany, were settlers from old Anatolia (now in southern Turkey). …
Read the full news article at EurekAlert
Wednesday, February 14, 2007
One of anthropology’s most enduring mysteries — the origins of the ancient Etruscan civilisation — may finally have been solved, with a study of cattle. …
Read the full news article at New Scientist
Saturday, January 21, 2006
Studies by five linguists from the United States, France, Russia, Denmark, and Iran on a discovered inscription in Jiroft indicate that this Elamit script is 300 years older than that of the great civilization of Susa. Archeologists believe that Jiroft was the origin of Elamit written language in which the writing system developed first and was then spread across the country and reached Susa. The discovered inscription of Jiroft is the most ancient written script found so far.
Read the full article at Persian Journal
Friday, January 13, 2006
The Indian subcontinent may have acquired agricultural techniques and languages, but it absorbed few genes from the west, said Vijendra Kashyap, director of India’s National Institute of Biologicals in Noida. The finding disputes a long-held theory that a large invasion of central Asians, traveling through a northwest Indian corridor, shaped the language, culture, and gene pool of many modern Indians within the past 10,000 years.
Read the full article at National Geographic
Tuesday, January 10, 2006
In a highly controversial move, the Sudanese government is planning to flood a vast stretch of the southern Nile valley as part of plans for a big hydro-electric dam at Merowe, near what was once the ancient city of Napata. With the dam scheduled for completion in 2008, archaeologists are in a race against time to survey what will eventually become a 100-mile-long lake. Already more than 700 sites of potential interest have been discovered in just one small part of the area to be flooded - showing the need not only for an urgent programme to rescue the most important artefacts, but also for a reappraisal of Sudan’s archaeological importance. The archaeologists’ biggest prize, however, still eludes them - a key to the ancient language of Meroitic, which first appeared on temples and artefacts during the 4th century BC but remains one of the world’s few undeciphered scripts.
Read the full article at Telegraph
Saturday, January 7, 2006
Evidence of Maya writing that dates to 2,300 years ago has turned up in a pyramidal structure in Guatemala. Researchers excavating the site-ruins at San Bartolo in the northeastern part of the country-say the finding could be among the earliest Maya written material ever found.
Read the full article at National Geographic
Friday, December 2, 2005
Tools for ancient texts have been successfully created that will open up rare texts and manuscripts locked away in museums, libraries and archives, and promote new kinds of scholarship while also preserving large swathes of European history and culture for the future. With funding from the IST programme and the US, the CHLT project has developed morphological analysers, citation databases, visualisation and clustering tools, and combined them with dictionaries to aid experienced scholars, students and the general public alike.
Read the full article at IST Results
Tuesday, November 15, 2005
Controversy has been brewing since last week’s announcement that a team of archaeologists had discovered an ancient alphabetic inscription on a stone unearthed near Tel Zayit, Israel.
Read the full article at Language Log
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