Protolanguage definition and example [was Re: Tongues untied]
The word "protolanguage" is a term of art in historical linguistics, in use in English for more than a century. It has a precise definition:
A protolanguage is the reconstruction of a prior stage of a group of related languages, providing prototype forms from which cognates in the different languages of the group can be derived by the application of regular rules of change. The protolanguage is constructed recursively, with more rules being added to the set of known changes as more data is added (from further investigations among the known languages, or from the addition of previously unrecognized or unknown members of the group.)
To provide a concrete example: It was recognized in the 18th Century (codified in a 1786 state by Sir William Jones) that Sanskrit was clearly related to Greek and Latin; Jones noted the probability that Celtic, Germanic and Persian were also related. Early in the 19th Century, Jacob Grimm noted the set of regular correspondences that confirm the Germanic relationship. (We call this set "Grimm's Law".)
In the 19th Century, Baltic and Slavic were added to the list early, with the recognition that Albanian and Armenian were also part of the group coming later. In 1876, Danish linguist Karl Verner explained some apparent exceptions to Grimm's Law as correlating with the Sanskrit accent. In 1879, a Swiss linguist named Ferdinand de Saussure posited some consonants in the reconstructed protolanguage based only on indirect evidence in the attested daughters.
In the very early 20th Century, 2 languages of Chinese Turkestan (as the area was then known) were discovered in Buddhist scriptures in caves. They were written in a script derived from an old Indian source, and were determined to be members of the Indo-European group we have been discussing.
In 1917, a Czech linguist, Friedrich (Bedřich) Hrozný, published a monograph demonstrating that an language from central Turkey, written in cuneiform and intermixed with Sumerian and Akkadian signs (not unlike the use of Chinese characters to write Japanese), was another unknown Indo-European language which we call Hittite. This claim was confirmed in 1927 by a Polish linguist, Jerzy Kuryłowicz, who pointed out that certain h-like consonants in the Hittite data occupied the places that Saussure had hypothesized in 1879, nearly 50 years earlier.
The last 80 years in Indo-European studies have, to a large extent, been a reassessment of the previous 150 years' research based on these discoveries, with deniers as well as accepters of the changes required by the data. The same techniques have been applied to dozens of language families, large (Afroasiatic, Austronesian) and small (Muskogean, Miwokan). One experiment was to take the data of the modern Romance languages and reconstruct a protolanguage for them, which turns out to be very similar to but more importantly not exactly the same as Latin, a proof that there are limits to as well as benefits from our reconstruction techniques.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
