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Authoritative: http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1119276   (Publisher's PDF... likely be available here.)

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Abstract

The challenge of tracing the history of the world's languages faces a serious problem--words change far too rapidly to reveal deep historical links. In his Perspective, Gray discusses language analyses by Dunn et al. in which a database of structural linguistic features was created and computational methods derived from evolutionary biology were applied. The approach offers new hope for uncovering these ancient connections.

@article{gray05languageRootsSCIENCE,
  author={Russell D. Gray},
  title={Pushing the Time Barrier in the Quest for Language Roots},
  journal={Science},
  year={2005},
  month={September},
  volume={309},
  number={5743},
  pages={2007-2008},
  doi={10.1126/science.1119276},
  url={http://www.isrl.uiuc.edu/~amag/langev/paper/gray05languageRootsSCIENCE.html}
}