Ancient languages reconstructed by computer program

A new tool has been developed that can reconstruct long-dead languages.

Researchers have created software that can rebuild protolanguages - the ancient tongues from which our modern languages evolved.

To test the system, the team took 637 languages currently spoken in Asia and the Pacific and recreated the early language from which they descended.

The work is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.

Currently language reconstructions are carried out by linguists - but the process is slow and labour-intensive.

Dan Klein, an associate professor at the University of California, Berkeley, said: "It's very time consuming for humans to look at all the data. There are thousands of languages in the world, with thousands of words each, not to mention all of those languages' ancestors.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-21427896