Eurasiatic Languages
The Eurasiatic Languages hypothesis (欧亚语系假说) was coined by U.S. linguist Joseph Greenberg, who believed there was a language system stretching beyond that of the Indo-European languages.
For a long time, however, the hypothesis proved rather controversial because of a lack of vindication.
In May of 2013, a group of scientists composed of British and New Zealanders, announced they found some clues to prove the existence of the Eurastiatic Languages and subsequently published their paper on “The Proceedings of Natural Academy of Sciences of the U.S.”
The research group discovered that mankind shared one language some 15,000 years ago. It then split into seven different languages, which continued to further divide into thousands of languages over the following 5,000 years.
The researchers found several words with similar pronunciations that had remained more or less unchanged over the course of history via computer-designed models. They looked up the words in dictionaries compiled specifically for primitive languages. From these dictionaries, they retrieved those words which can be traced back some 40,000 years and have equivalents in the Eurasiatic languages hypothesis.
According to the research, Eurasia has about five cognate words in four of its languages. However, the research still needs further scientific study and therefore the Eurasiatic languages shall remain a hypothesis for the time being.
