User:Charlesjohnsuofa/Evolution of Human Languages

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The Evolution of Human Languages (EHL) project is a historical-comparative linguistics research project hosted by the Santa Fe Institute. It aims to provide a detailed genealogical classification of the world's languages.

The project was founded in 2001 by Nobel laureate Murray Gell-Mann when he partnered with Sergei Starostin and Merritt Ruhlen to map out the evolutionary tree of human languages. Initial funding was provided by the Santa Fe Institute and the MacArthur Foundation. It is currently led by Russian linguist Georgiy Starostin, the son of Sergei Starostin.

Many of the project's members belong to the Moscow School of Comparative Linguistics, including Georgiy Starostin and Ilia Peiros. Other project members include Vaclav Blazek, John D. Bengtson, Edward Vajda, and other linguists.

Article body

The Evolution of Human Languages (EHL) is an international project – of which Georgiy Starostin inherited his father's membership – on "the linguistic prehistory of humanity" coordinated by the Santa Fe Institute. The project distinguishes about 6,000 languages currently spoken around the world, and aims to provide a detailed classification similar to the accepted classification of biological species.

Their idea is that "all representatives of the species Homo sapiens presumably share a common origin, [so] it would be natural to suppose – although this is a goal yet to be achieved – that all human languages also go back to some common source. Most existing classifications, however, do not go beyond some 300-400 language families that are relatively easy to discern. This restriction has natural reasons: languages must have been spoken and constantly evolving for at least 40,000 years (and quite probably more), while any two languages separated from a common source inevitably lose almost all superficially common features after some 6,000-7,000 years".

The Tower of Babel [ru] is an international etymological database project that is part of the Evolution of Human Languages project. It is coordinated by the Center of Comparative Linguistics [ru] of the Russian State University for the Humanities.

References

1. "Evolution of Human Languages: An international project on the linguistic prehistory of humanity". ehl.santafe.edu. Santa Fe Institute. Retrieved December 31, 2012.
^ Mark Pagel, Quentin D. Atkinson, Andreea S. Calude, Andrew Meade. Ultraconserved words point to deep language ancestry across Eurasia. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences May 2013, 110 (21) 8471-8476; doi:10.1073/pnas.1218726110
^ "Evolution of Human Languages": current state of affairs (March 2014).
^ Woodward, Richard B. "The Man Who Loved Languages: A Scholar with the Ability and Audacity to Rebuild the Tower of Babel Died a Year Ago, but His Controversial Project Lives on." The American Scholar 75, no. 4 (2006): 44-57. Accessed December 27, 2020.
^ Evolution of Human Languages - The Participants.
^ "Evolution of Human Languages - An Introduction" at Santafe.edu, retrieved 25 October 2007. New link, see here. Accessed Oct 27, 2009.
^ The Tower of Babel project. at Starling.rinet.ru, retrieved 25 October 2007.
^ Unified Transcription System (UTS) for the Global Lexicostatical Database.
^ Starostin, George (ed.) 2011-2019. The Global Lexicostatistical Database. Moscow: Higher School of Economics, & Santa Fe: Santa Fe Institute. Accessed on 2020-12-26.
^ Kassian, Alexei, George Starostin, Anna Dybo, Vasiliy Chernov. 2010. The Swadesh wordlist. An attempt at semantic specification. Journal of Language Relationship 4: 46–89. (PDF)
^ Starostin, George. Preliminary lexicostatistics as a basis for language classification: A new approach. Journal of Language Relationship, No. 3 (2010). P. 79–116.