Figure 1: Consensus tree and divergence-time estimates. The constraint tree used to filter the MCMC sample of trees also contained assumptions about Indo-European history that might have biased the ...

When it comes to working out the relationships between ancient languages, grammar is more enlightening than vocabulary, scientists say. There are some 300 language families in the world today.

A team of researchers is using a novel technique to comb through the data and to reconstruct major branches in the linguistic tree. The diversity of human languages can be likened to branches on a ...