Category: language reconstruction

197: The Birthplace of Indo-European (featuring Luisa Miceli)

Where did Indo-European come from?

It’s a controversial question that has set linguist against linguist for generations. But now DNA evidence is providing clues.

Linguist Luisa Miceli is in the studio with Daniel and Ben on this episode of Talk

163: EvoLang (featuring Mark Ellison)

How did language begin? What was it like long ago?

Did we come up with meaningful utterances first and then break them down, or did we build language from the words up? Did other pre-humans have language?

Researchers are working …

138: Proto-Indo-European

Before English was cool, there was Proto-Indo-European.

It’s the language that would turn into Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, and more. And it’s so old that it has no written records. So how do we know what it was like? And how …

119: Ultraconservative Words (featuring Luisa Miceli)

Words change slowly over time, but we can see how they look mostly the same, even in different languages.

Now a team of researchers is claiming that some “ultraconservative words” have maintained their similarity across languages for 15,000 years. Is …

107: Linguistic Time Machine

Linguists have always been interested in reconstructing languages from long ago.

By looking at how languages are now, we can work backwards to see how they must have been in the past. But now computer scientists are creating a kind …

47: Spoke Differently They?

What was early human language like?

A pair of researchers think they’ve reconstructed early human syntax from as early as 50,000 years ago. But have they got it right? How can we know about languages that no longer exist?

Linguist …

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