Deep common ancestry of Eurasiatic languages. Posted by TANNAnthropology, Breakingnews, Early Humans, Linguistics5:00 PM New research from the University of Reading shows that Ice Age people living in Europe 15,000 years ago might have used forms of some common words including I, you, we, man and bark, that in some cases could still be recognized today.
Using statistical models, Professor of Evolutionary Biology Mark Pagel and his team predicted that certain words would have changed so slowly over long periods of time as to retain traces of their ancestry for up to ten thousand or more years. These words point to the existence of a linguistic super-family tree that unites seven major language families of Eurasia (seven language families: Indo-European, Uralic, Altaic, Kartvelian, Dravidian, Chuckchee-Kamchatkan and Eskimo-Aleut). Previously linguists have relied solely on studying shared sounds among words to identify those that are likely to be derived from common ancestral words, such as the Latin pater and the English father. The amazing diversity of languages around the world, in one map. People on Earth speak thousands of different languages.
But given the ubiquity of some languages, like English and Mandarin, it's easy to forget just how many there are around the planet. This map provides some great perspective. Instead of representing each language, the map groups territory by which broader language family the dominant local language falls into. For instance, western and southern Europe are deep blue, because most locals speak one one of the Romance languages (like French, Spanish, and Italian) that descended from Latin. When you look globally, the diversity is dizzying: Wikimedia Commons/Industrius Some areas are particularly rich. Another thing that's interesting, though, is the global dominance of Indo-European languages. Wikimedia Commons/PiMaster3 One last note: though the globe's linguistic diversity is impressive, it's shrinking. National Geographic. Language and morality: Gained in translation. ¿Cómo 'hablan' los animales en los distintos idiomas del mundo?
The guide to languages, alphabets and other writing systems.