Kusunda, a language like no other?

May 25, 2012 by

Kusunda is a dying isolate language. Gyani Maiya Sen, a 75-year-old woman from western Nepal, is its last known speaker. There are some 100-160 people in the Kusunda tribe, and some of them know a few words of the language, but...

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Was Proto-Human an SOV language?

Oct 17, 2011 by

Most scholars agree that all of today’s languages descend from a common ancestral language, Proto-Human, which was spoken by behaviourally modern humans (BMHs) some time between 200,000 and 50,000 years ago. (Some theories...

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Typological features and tracing language history

Jul 26, 2010 by

Generally speaking, historical linguistics tries to elucidate patterns of language change and to determine language relatedness. Most of this work, starting with the work of earliest philologists such as James Parsons and William...

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