real proto-lang

[JoatSimeon at aol.com]

In a message dated 7/13/01 1:23:06 AM Mountain Daylight Time,
petegray at btinternet.com writes:

> So while at one level I relate to your idea, at another I think there are
> advantages in treating our reconstructions as if they were actual spoken
> human languages - even while admitting the limits of our knowledge.

-- I think it would be more accurate to say that they're probably very like
the language as it was actually spoken.  That's about as much as we can say;
on the other hand, we can say that much.

After all, on numerous occasions the discovery of recorded earlier forms has
conformed closely to reconstructions made earlier -- the laryngeals in
Hittite come to mind, or many of the archaic forms of Mycenaean Greek.