Science, Maths & Technology
How can statistics bring dead languages back to life?
...based method to move back through the family tree of languages that stem from PIE. They can simulate how certain words would have sounded when they were spoken 8,000 years ago. Remarkably, at the heart of the technology is the statistics of shape. “Sounds have shape,” explains Professor John Aston, from Cambridge’s Statistical Laboratory. “As a word is uttered it...