Austronesian Linguistics in the media

[Christopher Sundita]

Hello AN-Lang Members,

Austronesian historical linguistics is currently in the news. Was quite a
surprise - some of the article headlines made references to the Rosetta
Stone or what not. In a nutshell, researchers from the University of
British Columbia and UC Berkeley developed a model and algorithm in
reconstructing Proto-Austronesian. They used 637 languages in the
Austronesian Basic Vocabulary Database (
http://language.psy.auckland.ac.nz/austronesian/ ).

Just some of the articles this was mentioned:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-21427896
http://www.nature.com/news/computer-program-roots-out-ancestors-of-modern-tongues-1.12407
http://phys.org/news/2013-02-computerized-rosetta-stone-reconstructs-ancient.html
http://news.yahoo.com/software-revives-dead-tongues-141348127.html

The article itself is available for download at:

http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2013/02/05/1204678110.abstract

What are you thoughts on this?

--Chris Sundita

Christopher Sundita
Graduate Student, Linguistics
Cornell University
http://conf.ling.cornell.edu/csundita
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