real proto-lang

Rich Alderson alderson+mail at panix.com
Fri Jul 6 00:46:46 UTC 2001


On 2 Jul 2001, Jurgis Pakerys wrote (quoting Larry Trask from a post by Steve
Long):

[Larry Trask:]

>> In a message dated 6/27/2001 12:29:59 AM, larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk writes:
>> << And what is that?  So far as I know, all I have ever claimed about the
>> comparative method is that it cannot produce proto-languages that never
>> existed.  And that's just true.  Do you want to challenge this? >>

> I hope prof. Trask didn't mean that _all_ proto-languages (produced by
> comparative method) really existed. I've always imagined that there's some
> degree of uncertainty and those proto-languages cannot be compared to the
> real ones.

[ snip ]

> Maybe I'm wrong, but it looks very hard to reconstruct a _real_
> proto-language. Sometimes we're able to reconstruct only fragments of it (I'm
> not saying this about very well documented language families). I guess it's
> better to understand those proto-languages as some tools of comparative
> linguistics than real languages that existed at some point of time.

The question only arises from a misunderstanding of the term "protolanguage".

A protolanguage is a construct of the comparative method which *models* the
real language ancestral to the languages which go into the comparison, but it
is not that actual language.  Depending on the breadth of the materials from
which linguists can draw in the reconstruction process, it may be very close,
but it will not and cannot be the ancestral language itself.

(Some writers in English have the very bad habit of referring to unattested
languages ancestral to known families as "protolanguages", but this is a misuse
of the term, and confusing to non-linguists and to those not well versed in the
theoretical side of historical linguistics.)

So if we can only reconstruct fragments of an ancestral language, our proto-
language is deficient, but that does not make it wrong in what it does capture,
nor does it make it a "protolanguage that never existed".  The latter term
would refer to the ability to create a protolanguage from, e. g., English,
Nahuatl, and Xhosa, and have it stand scrutiny.

								Rich Alderson
								linguist at large



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