real proto-lang

[Rich Alderson]

On 21 Jul 2001, Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen wrote:

> we do indeed work on the assumption that PIE and all the intermediate stages
> between it and the attested daughter languages were real and actually spoken
> languages.

The only quibble I have with this statement is the inclusion of the "P" in
"PIE".  I try always to make the distinction between "IE" (the real language
ancestral to all the attested daughter languages) and "PIE" (our reconstruction
of that language), because the latter is almost certainly not a synchronically
real language due to complete loss of lexicon (including bound morphemes) over
time.  (It is for this reason that I find myself irritated at times by those
non-linguists who write as if they think there is a *diachronic* distinction to
be made between "IE" and "PIE".)

This, rather than the more extreme "abstractionist" reading of the results of
the comparative method, is what I intended to get across in my responses to the
original poster.

								Rich Alderson
								linguist at large