BBC:
An international team of researchers has created a computer
program that they believe can be used to help reconstruct the
long-extinct precursors of modern languages. They used a
database of 142 000 words and pronunciations from a collection
of currently spoken Asian and Pacific languages and calculated
probabilities of sound changes to calculate the parent language
from which the current languages evolved. When compared to a
parent language reconstructed by hand by linguists, 85% of the
words in the computer generated language were within one sound
difference of words in the linguist-constructed language. The
benefit of the software is the large amount of data it can
analyze quickly. However, that has to be balanced against its
inability to recognize various quirks of language that make it
less accurate than professional linguists.
