The proto-language from which most modern languages descended likely featured a sentence structure in which the verb came last, say SFI Distinguished Fellow Murray Gell-Mann and Stanford anthropologist Merritt Ruhlen in a paper in PNAS.

The researchers utilized a tentative family tree for 2,135 past and present languages, placing them on the tree based on comparisons of similar sounds with similar meanings.

They note that most attested languages -- including languages spoken now and recent languages we have in writing -- follow a Yoda-like subject-object-verb (SOV) sentence structure, such as "He the bear killed.”

According to the tree, those languages that feature a subject-verb-object (SVO) word order, such as English, descended from SOV languages, as did languages featuring the more rare VSO and VOS word orders and the very rare OVS and OSV word orders.

Reverting to SOV was unusual and is attributed to a process known as borrowing, or diffusion, they say.

“Many linguists have concluded that word order changes have washed back and forth long enough to produce a kind of equilibrium,” says Gell-Mann. “We disagree. The evolutionary path of word order changes can, in most cases, be reconstructed, and we find that it moves away from SOV, most often to SVO.”

Just how long ago this proto-language was spoken is unresolved -- some say 50,000 years ago, others (as the paper pre-supposes) suggest it could have emerged from a much more recent linguistic bottleneck.

Read the PNAS paper (October 10, 2011)

Read the USA Today article (October 17, 2011)

Read the Huffington Post article (October 14, 2011)

Watch the Fox News story (October 13, 2011)

Read the MSNBC.com article (October 13, 2011)

Read the LiveScience article (October 13, 2011)

Read the Physorg.com article (October 12, 2011)

Read the Red Orbit article (October 15, 2011)

Read the io9 article (October 11, 2011)

Read the New Scientist article (October 10, 2011)

Read the News Track India article (October 11, 2011)

Read The Daily Mail article (October 17, 2011)

Read the article in The Week (October 17, 2011)

Read the International Business Times article (October 18, 2011)