“They use the DNA to reconstruct the family tree of the viruses. But rather than looking at viruses, we were looking for languages. And rather than looking at DNA, we were looking at the words in the different languages.”
The researchers used a statistical method that evolutionary biologists use to show how different species are related on a family tree. They analyzed two hundred two cognates, or words with shared meanings and similar sounds. They studied them across one hundred three languages, including twenty that are no longer spoken.
Quentin Atkinson says examining the similarities and differences in these cognates helped establish family ties. For example, in English and other Germanic languages, the word for "water" sounds something like the English word "water" or "wasser" in German. But in the Romance languages that came from Latin, the word sounds a lot different, something like "agua" in Spanish or "acqua" in Italian.
Mr. Atkinson says that although some words are more closely related than others, they are tied together on branches of the Indo-European family tree.
“We know where the languages are. They are like the leaves of the tree, and we know how they are connected, and we trace back along those branches back through time and space to work out where the origin is.”
He argues that Indo-European started to expand across Europe with the spread of agriculture.
最新
2013-11-25
2013-11-25
2013-11-25
2013-11-25
2013-11-25
2013-11-25