2024-01-29 16:42:05
To find the common origin between different languages, scientists rely on linguistic structures, grammar, vocabulary, etc. in order to find similarities. Konstantin Postumitenko / Prostock-studio – stock.adobe.com
DECRYPTION – A vast study proposes a hybrid approach to provide new perspectives on the history of this linguistic family spoken by half of the human population.
The large family of Indo-European languages includes more than half of the planet’s inhabitants. From the Cape of Brittany to the Bay of Bengal, our languages, although so different to the ear, share a common origin. Several theories exist to explain their dispersion and, with it, the history of Indo-European populations.
A study published in 2023 in the journal Science mixes genetics and glottochronology, a science which aims to calculate the distance between two diapers based on vocabulary, and presents a new scenario. Researchers from the Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, brought together an international team of more than 80 language specialists to construct a new core vocabulary dataset to from 161 Indo-European languages, including 52 ancient languages, which they then compared to genetic data.
“The steppe hypothesis”
According to these results, the original focus…
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