An Auckland University researcher who stunned linguists worldwide by tracing the origins of English to farmers in Turkey 9000 years ago is studying Pacific and South American language origins.
Russell Gray applies mathematic and computer tools biologists use for drawing up family trees of genes and species to create "language trees".
Last
year, his work with PhD student Quentin Atkinson on reconstructing the Indo-European family of languages was published in Nature magazine, attracting worldwide attention.
Dr Gray and co-researcher Lyle Campbell, of the University of Utah, will use a recent Marsden Fund grant to extend their analysis of original Pacific settler languages to Mayan and Aztec languages of Mesoamerica.
The research aims to further understanding about why languages split and diversify. It will test the theory that language dispersal was driven by the inception and spread of agriculture.
"As humans, we are generally curious about our origins," Dr Gray said in a statement yesterday.
The researchers plan to investigate the timing of expansions of four Mesoamerican Indian language families that existed about 6000 years ago in what is now Mexico.
Existing sources will be used to construct large databases of basic vocabulary for four language families, which will be converted into matrices for analyses of their evolutionary history.
- NZPA
