XML

Some linguists posit that all natural languages arose from a single natural language that existed some 12 thousand years ago. In the cool-guy linguist cliques this ur-sprache from which all languages are hypothesized to have arisen goes by the cipher Nostratic. The coolest of the cool in this linguist's inner-sanctum of ur-sprache theorists is Joseph Greenberg. He's been working on this idea since dinosaurs wore bell-bottoms. Even critics of this idea are starting to take it seriously. Donald Ringe, a vehement opponent of this idea, and a slew of his buddies have used techniques related to ferreting out animal evolution through tracing changes in DNA to trace the branches of the language family tree. Through all their toil, they found that Uralic and Indo-European, two language families, were acturally related in a statistically significant manner, a result which supports the Nostratic hypothesis not what the Ringe-man wanted.

In growing such a language family trees as those in figure , linguists are faced with a tough problem; they are presented with an faggot of languages whose branches they must sort through to find the branches, worn by time, which connected these languages eons ago to the ur-sprache Nostratic. We, on the other hand, are in quite the opposite situation regarding XML. XML is the ur-sprache of many languages which are currently spoken on the internet. For example, HTML, XML-PRC, SOAP, ZOAP, MathML...all derive from the internet ur-sprache XML. Also, XML provides a well defined set of rules which allow one to finger other branches off the ur-sprache trunk of XML. This set of rules which allow one to finger other branches go by the name of XML schemas and are the topic of the next section.