A study by American anthropologists from Stanford University and the Santa Fe Institute reveals that our ancestors placed words in sentences in a similar way to Master Yoda from Star Wars . That is, pronouncing subject, direct object and verb , instead of the current order of most languages (subject followed by verb and complements). For example, they would say? You can speak well can? or "I hunt mammoth." Details of the work are published today in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
To reach this conclusion, the researchers created a family tree for 2,200 different languages , some of them living and some of them disused, such as Latin, based on the similarity of sounds for equal meanings. Using this tree, Merritt Ruhlen and Murray Gell-Mann found that current languages, in which the verb is placed after the subject, usually descend from a language in which the subject is followed by the complement and the verb is placed at the end . What is not clear, the authors emphasize, is that no order of word placement offered any evolutionary advantage for our ancestors.
