Ancient Linguistics</tile> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"> <meta http-equiv="description" content="Ancient Linguistics"> <meta http-equiv="keywords" content="Ancient,Linguistics"> </head> <body> <table width="100%" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0"> <tr> <td width="10" height="39"> </td> <td width="99%" height="39"> <table width="100%" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0"> <tr> <td width="16%"><a href="http://inttranews.inttra.net"><img src="http://inttranews.inttra.net/images/inttranews_grey_2.jpg" width="192" height="37" border="0"></a></td> <td width="50%" valign="middle"> <p><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2"><b><font color="#CCCCCC" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="1">KNOW.<br> HOW.</font></b></font> </p> </td> <td width="34%" align="right" valign="top"><font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="1" color="#666666">23-09-2005</font></td> </tr> </table> </td> </tr> <tr> <td width="10"> </td> <td width="99%" > </td> </tr> <tr> <td width="10"> </td> <td width="99%" > <table width="100%" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0"> <tr> <td width="100%"><font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2"> <b>Ancient Linguistics</b></font> </td> </tr> <tr> <td width="100%"> </td> </tr> <tr> <td width="100%"> <img src="http://inttranews.inttra.net/img_news/img_UW6pcLY00noFBD6zQe17_0.jpeg" align="left" vspace="5" hspace="5" ><font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">California, USA (AAAS / ScienceMag): Studying the relationship of languages has traditionally depended on recognizing "cognate sets" of word pairs matched across languages and reconstructing the changes in their sounds and meaning. However, because of linguistic erosion, this method is limited to a time depth of only 8000 to 10,000 years, but much human migration occurred before then. The authors of this report develop a method that uses the language structure, rather than vocabulary, to construct language phylogenies, and <br>allows a much deeper sampling of linguistic time. Using features such as the ordering of sentence elements or the grammatical elements of gender or tense, they constructed phylogenies of Papuan languages in Island Melanesia that may have been separated since the late Pleistocene. <br> <br>For more information, please visit: <br><a href="http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/309/5743/2007?etoc" target="blank">www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/309/5743/2007?etoc</a> <br></font></td> </tr> </table> </td></tr> </table> <script type="text/javascript"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="<http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show