Using common lists of words that are found in all or nearly all languages, linguists can identify shared sets of cognate words—words that descend from common ancestral words— just as it is possible to identify homologous genes that share a common ancestral gene.
Yes. Using common lists of words that are found in all or nearly all languages, linguists can identify shared sets of cognate words—words that descend from common ancestral words— just as it is possible to identify homologous genes that share a common ancestral gene. For instance the Spanish mano (‘hand’) and the French main descend from the earlier Latin manus, while the English and German words hand do not. A cognate set identifies groups of related languages. In the example here mano and main identify the so-called Romance languages (Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese) and hand and hand identify the Germanic languages (Fig. 1). By combining the information in many different cognate sets with appropriate statistical models [ 25, 26], it is possible to infer detailed family histories or phylogenetic trees of language families, such as has been done for the Indo-European languages (Fig. 1). These phylogenies are directly analogous to phylogenies of biological species.