Many linguists believe all human languages derived from a single tongue spoken in East Africa around 50,000 years ago. They’ve found clues scattered throughout the vocabularies and grammars of the world as to how that original “proto-human language” might have sounded. New research suggests that it sounded somewhat like the speech of Yoda.

“A long time ago,” indeed … though perhaps not such a far, far away galaxy.

More here (HT: Tamar Yellin).