London, Oct 11 (ANI): Linguists have claimed that they have clues about the way our ancestors spoke.
Although the Proto human language, which dates back to the first behaviourally modern humans 50,000 years ago, marks the origination of all known languages in the world, there is very little information available about the form of the language used.
Thus, delving into the intricacies of this subject, the linguists, Merritt Ruhlen of Stanford University, California, and Murray Gell-Mann have asserted that the ancestral language followed subject-object-verb principle unlike the modern day language, which follows subject-verb-object, reports New Scientist.
For the purpose, the linguists had created a family tree for 2200 languages, living and dead at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico.
The tree was based on the usage of similar sounds for the same meanings. Most modern languages use subject-verb-object sentences: "I see the dog", while most dead ones, such as Latin, go subject-object-verb - "I the dog see".
In the Ruhlen and Gell-Mann's tree, subject-verb-object languages always descend from subject-object-verb languages, but never the other way around.
"This tells us that the putative ancestral language had subject-object-verb word order," New Scientist quoted Ruhlen as saying.
Despite this revelation, some of the mainstream linguists are doubtful about the tree's validity. (ANI)
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