Indo-European -- the mother tongue of such modern and extinct languages as American English, Haitian Creole, Gaelic, Punjabi and ancient Hittite -- originated 8,000 to 10,000 years ago, perhaps among ancient farmers in what is now Turkey, according to new research released today. Using computational techniques borrowed from evolutionary biology, researchers calculated rates of change in basic words -- body parts, personal pronouns, kinship and numerals -- and projected the results backward in time. Scientists use the same techniques to sequence DNA in studying the evolution of organisms. The new analysis, reported in today's edition of the journal Nature, retraces the same ground as a controversial discipline called "glottochronology" -- calculating dates of language divergence by examining cognates, or words that are similar in two or more languages.

"It gave some obviously inaccurate results, and linguists gave up on it," said evolutionary biologist Russell D. Gray, lead researcher of the new study. "I was interested in using more sophisticated computational methods to get at dates of divergence."

The study's conclusions, however, have placed Gray and co-author Quentin D. Atkinson, both of New Zealand's University of Auckland, squarely in the middle of one of the most contentious debates in modern linguistics: whether Indo-European originated with Anatolian farmers in Turkey 8,500 or 10,000 years ago; or, as many scholars believe, with Kurgan horsemen on the Asian steppe 6,000 years ago; or elsewhere.

"The problem you face among Indo-Europeanists is that [building a root language] is hard," said Ives Goddard, the Smithsonian Institution's senior linguist. "Really smart people have been working on this for a very long time, and nobody believes you can get good results with just a word list anymore. Indo-Europeanists think this is junk science."

The quest to reconstruct an Indo-European mother tongue began in 1786, when the British scholar and linguist Sir William Jones noticed and described marked similarities between Indian Sanskrit and ancient Greek and Latin.


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