Skip to main content

Computer program reconstructs dead languages

medieval-language-flickr-mortsan

A computer program might help us reconstruct the roots of our languages (called protolanguages), according to a study by a group of researchers from California and Canada. Linguists have been going over different languages with a fine-tooth comb in an effort to piece together puzzles and be able to determine the protolanguages from which modern day languages have evolved, but it’s an arduous task that will take us ages. “It would take hundreds of lifetimes to pore over all those languages, cross-referencing all the different changes that happened across such an expanse of space – and of time,” UC Berkeley associate professor Dan Klein told the BBC. “This is where computers shine,” he added. 

The researchers tested the program by feeding it 142,000 words from 637 languages currently spoken around Asia and the Pacific. The program generated a protolanguage scientists believe was spoken in the region roughly 7,000 years ago. Since this was something the researchers knew beforehand, they were able to asses the program’s accuracy. According to the researchers, over 85 percent of the words reconstructed by the computer program were only one character off from the words reconstructed by an expert in Austronesian languages (a language family spread throughout the islands of Southeast Asia and the Pacific).

Related Videos

The reconstruction of protolanguages involves identifying patterns in similar words that have variations in the way they’re pronounced. According to Klein, “the trick is to identify these patterns of change and then to ‘reverse’ them, basically evolving words backwards in time.” As the program has yet to reach 100 percent accuracy, it serves only as a tool to speed up the process by helping linguists. It will not replace them. By digging into the language of our ancestors, we can also know more about their era they lived in, and understand the world’s history a lot more clearly. Time’s Techland blog interviewed Alex Bouchard-Côté, one of the researchers, who said: “If you can figure out if the language of the settling population had a word for wheel, then you can get some idea of the order in which things occurred, because you would have some records that show you when the wheel was invented.”

Image via Morten Oddvik

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
AMD graphics cards have this one unsung advantage over Nvidia
amd gpus have this one unsung advantage over nvidia software main window skewed

AMD graphics cards have gotten a lot of the limelight recently, especially as the new RX 7900 XTX undercuts Nvidia's RTX 4080 in performance. But as AMD has continued to refine its GPU performance, another big area of improvement has been bubbling under the surface -- AMD Software.

It's been AMD Software, Radeon Software, Adrenalin, and various other names in the past, but regardless of the name, AMD has continued to iterate and improve the software experience for its GPUs. And the version we have now is a big reason why AMD can go up against the best graphics cards.
Everything, all in one place

Read more
This creepy Mac app can record every moment of your online life
The Rewind app on an iMac with a pink background, showing a grid of faces from a Zoom call

A new app for your Mac claims it can record every moment of your online life and store it for retrieval. We're talking about every moment, from your emails to your chats to your FaceTime and Zoom calls.

Rewind is a work in progress from Brett Bejcek and Dan Siroker, two American entrepreneurs who between them have worked with Spotify and Optimizely. They claim Rewind is like a search engine for your life.

Read more
This new Best Buy program lets you lease a MacBook
A MacBook Pro M2 sits on a wooden table with a nice bokeh background.

Mac users in the US can now upgrade their MacBooks thanks to a new program Best Buy offers, called Upgrade+. It’s like a car lease, but for a Mac.

It works like this: You finance a new MacBook for 36 months with Best Buy. When the term is over, you can return the MacBook and finance a new one or pay a one-time balloon payment to close the contract and keep your Mac.

Read more