{"id": "card_n_770170ab1111", "kind": "note", "title": "The linguistic clock — the comparative method dates the dispersal", "body": "The same history is written in the words. The comparative method reconstructs ancestral\ntongues from their daughters (sealed in the language-evolution wing), and glottochronology's\nexponential vocabulary decay gives a rough clock — 47% of basic words shared after five\nmillennia, sealed (https://narrowhighway.com/s/222afa501ad9a65a6cbb50011690b7b5363cc002934bf367eac99bf946b5774b), a ~4,595-year half-life sealed earlier. Loanwords date contact;\nplace-names fossilize vanished peoples; the spread of Indo-European — English to Hindi to\nPersian — maps a migration as surely as a haplogroup does. Computational phylogenetics now dates\nlanguage trees with the same Bayesian math biology uses for genes. Run independently, the\nlinguistic clock and the genetic clock draw congruent maps. Honest: the rates are HEURISTIC and\nperturbed by contact — a trend, not a law. RESONANCE with the genetic clock; the words remember\nthe road.", "source": {"label": "Concordance assay — 2026-07-09", "url": "https://narrowhighway.com/s/222afa501ad9a65a6cbb50011690b7b5363cc002934bf367eac99bf946b5774b", "ref": "tracing_peoples", "authority_tier": "engine_derived"}, "shelf": "science", "box": "human_origins", "bands": ["comparative method", "glottochronology", "linguistic clock", "indo-european", "loanwords", "phylogenetics", "migration", "dispersal", "place names"], "connections": [], "author": "engine", "created_at": "2026-07-10T02:23:13.207894+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-07-10T02:23:13.207894+00:00", "visibility": "public", "lifecycle_stage": "public", "volatility": "permanent", "surface": "secular", "metrics": {"paperclips_count": 0, "helpful_count": 0, "not_helpful_count": 0, "cite_count": 0, "walks_through_count": 0, "flagged_count": 0}, "source_hash": "0e80e283a4574e8921b48ce86030b0be47c446ee6840a07885ed0b101b6b4682"}