The research team found that at least 6.5438+0.5 million years ago, a language began to split. It split into seven different languages and continued to split into thousands of languages in the next 5000 years. These languages later became the languages spoken by billions of people in Europe and Asia. They speculate that from English and Portuguese to Japanese and Urdu, these languages are likely to be "homologous".
The researchers first found some words with similar pronunciations in different languages in this area through computer models, and then searched these words in the original language thesaurus reconstructed by linguists, and found that there was a high coincidence rate. They also found that some commonly used pronouns, numerals and adverbs have remained basically unchanged for tens of thousands of years in the Eurasian language family. For example, "I", "we", "two" and "three" are the oldest words, and the history of these words can be traced back to 40 thousand years ago.
In addition, they also identified 23 "longest-lived" words, and the meanings of these words have hardly changed in the past 654.38+500,000 years. Its research shows that from 2000 to 4000, about half of the words will be replaced by completely different words every year; In the Eurasian language family, at least four language families have five cognates (words with the same pronunciation and meaning in different languages).
Professor Mark Pegel, the first author of the paper, a member of the Royal Society and an evolutionary biologist at the University of Reading, said that this discovery provided a new clue to confirm the existence of Eurasian language family, which was helpful to understand the formation mechanism and evolution process of language. Professor William Croft, a linguist at the University of New Mexico in the United States, commented that this study puts forward a possibility that researchers can combine linguistic data with archaeology and anthropology to infer prehistoric events of human beings, such as human migration and interpersonal communication.
Are the languages of Eurasia really homologous? To answer this question accurately, further scientific argumentation is needed, and the conclusions drawn from the argumentation must stand the test of related disciplines. For various reasons, the problem of language homology has been puzzling academic circles (especially linguistics).
Language homology is closely related to language evolution, and the latter is also difficult to solve. As Professor Zhou Haizhong, a linguist and mathematician in China, said, it is as difficult to solve the problem of language evolution as it is to solve the mystery of species evolution. The evolution of language is not only a social phenomenon, but also a natural phenomenon, and it is also the result of human psychological development and historical and cultural evolution. Because language evolution has its internal causes and external influences, it increases the complexity of this problem. So as of May 20 13, the theory of Eurasian language family is still a hypothesis.