New Ancient Language Discovered

Archaeologists working in Ziyaret Tepe in southeast Turkey have discovered a 2500-year-old clay tablet containing a previously unknown cuneiform language, possibly that of emigrants from the Zagros Mountains to the Assyrian city of Tušhan.

Computer Analysis of Torah

Researchers have developed a computing algorithm specifically to analyze the books of the Bible to identify individual contributing sources by focusing strictly on writing style instead of content, specifically the use of function words and synonyms.

Origins of Japanese Dialect

Linguistic researchers have concluded from a study of various Japanese dialects that the Japanese people are descended from rice-growing farmers from the Korean peninsula who arrived on the islands about 2200 years ago and not from the original hunter-gatherers inhabiting the islands some 30,000 years ago.

New Language Found

A National Geographic team working to record threatened indigenous languages has discovered one entirely new to linguists in northeast India named Koro, belonging to the Tibeto-Burman family of languages, and spoken by only between 800 and 1200 people.

Lost Peruvian Language

Notes scribbled on the back of a 400-year-old letter by an unknown Spanish author reveal a previously unknown Peruvian language, possibly related to the indigenous Quechua language but revealing a distinct local dialect unknown to modern scholars.

Language Study Traces Pacific Settlement

Scientists at the University of Auckland have completed a human language study that traces the settlement of the South Pacific to its origins on the island of Taiwan.

Using a computer to analyze 400 Austronesian languages spread across the Pacific islands, the historical trace and progress of how prehistoric cultures settled these locations can be determined. They found the ancestors of modern Austronesians originated in Taiwan about 5200 years ago, entered the Philippines about a thousand years later and from there rapidly expanded throughout Polynesia as far as Fiji, Samoa and Tonga. After another pause of roughly a thousand years, settlement expanded again to areas as far away as Hawaii and Easter Island.

The "family tree" of Pacific languages was constructed by a comparative analysis of simple vocabulary such as words for animals, numbers, colors and simple verbs. The Austronesian group is one of the largest families of languages in the world, containing more than 1200 languages spread across the Pacific.

These results were published in a recent edition of Science.

Source: ScienceDaily