You say puh-tay-tow, I say puh-tah-tow, but how did our
ancestors use language millennia ago? Typically you’d ask a
linguist, but manually reconstructing protolanguages —
hypothetical early languages from which extant ones evolved —
can be a lengthy, arduous process. What if you could get
reasonably close in a fraction of the time by using a computer?
Researchers in Canada and California have done exactly that by
designing software that can take rules about how language-
related sounds change over time to essentially reverse-engineer
the process and recreate the rudiments of lost root languages —
a sort of linguistic time machine-meets-Rosetta stone. The idea
that language changes over time is obvious enough on
contemporary time-scales — just look at dialects. Today some
people say “axed” (phonetically) instead of “asked” while others
say “howdy” instead of “hello.” When I lived in Denton, Texas,
folks said “y’all” instead of “you all,” and the colloquialism
“ain’t” (instead of “am not” or “is not”) — the bane