Phrasebook

The language of our ancestors

Modern languages can be analyzed by linguists. Various methods are used to do so. But how did people speak thousands of years ago? It is much more difficult to answer this question. Despite this, scientists have been busy researching for years. They would like to explore how people spoke earlier. In order to do this, they attempt to reconstruct ancient speech forms. American scientists have now made an exciting discovery. They analyzed more than 2,000 languages. In particular they analyzed the sentence structure of the languages. The results of their study were very interesting. About half of the languages had the S-O-V sentence structure. That is to say, the sentences are ordered by subject, object and verb. More than 700 languages follow the pattern S-V-O. And about 160 languages operate according to the V-S-O system. Only about 40 languages use the V-O-S pattern. 120 languages display a hybrid. On the other hand, O-V-S and O-S-V are distinctly rarer systems. The majority of the analyzed languages use the S-O-V principle. Persian, Japanese and Turkish are some examples. Most living languages follow the S-V-O pattern, however. This sentence structure dominates the Indo-European language family today. Researchers believe that the S-O-V model was used earlier. All languages are based on this system. But then the languages diverged. We don't yet know how that happened. However, the variation of sentence structures must have had a reason. Because in evolution, only that which has an advantage prevails…