Language
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The original "proto-human language" that many linguists believe all modern languages evolved from might have closely resembled the out-of-order speech pattern of the Star Wars character Yoda, claims a new study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The study, which was the work of Santa Fe Institute Program on the Evolution of Human Languages co-directors Merritt Ruhlen and Murray Gell-Mann, discovered that the original tongue used in East Africa some 50,000 years ago used a subject-object-verb (SOV) structure instead of a subject-verb-object (SVO) structure used by most modern languages.

For example, says LiveScience/Life's Little Mysteries reporter Natalie Wolchover, the English language uses SVO ordering, so a sentence would be structured like this: "I like you." Other languages, such as Latin - and, assuming the study is correct, the "proto-human language" - use SOV ordering in which the same sentence would be written and spoke like this: "I you like."

Ruhlen and Gell-Mann studied approximately 2,200 languages, both dead and alive, and grouped them into a "family tree" of sorts, according to the Huffington Post.

They discovered that in some cases, other structures are used, including object-subject-verb (OSV), object-verb-subject (OVS), verb-object-subject (VOS) and verb-subject-object (VSO) were used - but in every single case, SOV structures and other patterns preceded SVO sentence structures, without fail.

"For example, all the Romance languages (Italian, Rumanian, French, Spanish) derive from Latin, which was spoken in Rome 2,000 years ago; that Latin family is itself a branch of an even larger tree, whose other branches include Germanic, Slavic, Greek, Indic and others," Wolchover wrote.

"This language would have been spoken by a small East African population who seemingly invented fully modern language and then spread around the world, replacing everyone else," Ruhlen told Life's Little Mysteries, a website affiliated with LiveScience, via email. "These families - all families - are identified by finding words in a set of languages that are similar to each other but not found elsewhere."

"What we found was that the distribution of the six possible word orders did not vary randomly. ... Rather, the distribution of these six types was highly structured, and the paths of linguistic change in word order were clear," Ruhlen added, concluding that "the word order in the language from which all modern languages derive must have been SOV."