Sentences with phrase «language family branched»

An American linguist named Swadesh reasoned that if you could identify these basic, stubborn word - concepts you could (using an assumption about the rate of linguistic change) find commonalities and divergences among languages, allowing linguists to date the points at which one language or language family branched away from another.

Not exact matches

When it comes to languages, the Pama - Nyungan tree «gives us the first and only hypothesis of the higher - level branching of the Pama - Nyungan family,» says Harold Koch, a historical linguist at ANU who was not involved in the Nature study, although he was Bowern's undergraduate adviser.

Another of the authors, Stephen Levinson, comments, «This is a bit of an unexpected finding, since many have thought that grammar might give us deeper insight into the linguistic past than vocabulary, but there is still some reason for caution: we compared highly conservative vocabulary with an unfiltered range of grammar variables, and the language family is unusual for the way it diversified during colonization of successive islands, But what is clear is that grammar and vocabulary changes are not closely coupled, even within branches of a family, so looking at them both significantly advances our ability to reconstruct linguistic history.»