Proto Language

4 Key excerpts on "Proto Language"

• 

  eBook - PDF

  The Prehistory of Languages

  • Mary R. Haas(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  32 PROTOLANGUAGES AND PROBLEMS OF RECONSTRUCTION where but will persist in their own areas completely uninfluenced by the fact that they did not find a place in the written language of today. Still more important, there are many things which will inevitably be lost in all the daughter languages and thus be unre-coverable by the comparative method. These are the reasons why Proto-Romance is not in all details identical with recorded Latin. But this fact, far from being an indictment of the comparative method is an elegant example of its tremendous power. Every protolanguage was in the same way once a real language, whether or not we are fortunate enough to have written records of it. Furthermore, even when we do have written records, we find that what we are able to reconstruct of a given protolanguage always falls short of giving us the full picture of the real language it stands for. But written records fall short, too, as we have seen in the case of local pronunciation variations, lexical items, and turns of expression, and reconstruction methods can and do, in fact, give us information about parent languages not to be found in written records. We are of course twice blessed when we have both, as in the case of Proto-Romance and Latin. When we have only the reconstructed protolanguage, however, we still have a glorious artifact, one which is far more precious than anything an archeol-ogist can ever hope to unearth. A protolanguage, then, is reconstructed out of the evidence that is acquired by the careful comparison of the daughter languages and, in the beginning of the work, what is reconstructed reflects what can be discovered by working backwards in those cases where all or most of the daughter languages point to the same conclusion. This provides the initial framework. Once this is established, the principle of analogy can be drawn upon, and by its use instances in which there are aberrations, statistically speaking, can often also be plausibly accounted for.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  Pacific Languages : An Introduction

  • John Lynch(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • University of Hawai'i Press

    (Publisher)

  The words and structures were present in some form in an an-cestor language and have been retained, usually in a modifed form, in the daughter languages. This then leads to the conclusion that the languages sharing these similarities are related, belong to the same language family, and derive from the same protolanguage. 1.3.2. Reconstructing a Protolanguage In addition to being able to show, with reasonable confdence, that a set of languages are related and derive from the same common ancestor, historical-comparative linguists can reconstruct what many of the sounds, words, and grammatical structures in the protolanguage were probably like. An important principle in reconstruction, especially in dealing with simi-larities in vocabulary, is that of the regularity of sound correspondences . Look at the following examples from the Aroma, Hula, and Sinagoro lan-guages spoken on the coast east of Port Moresby in Papua New Guinea: Aroma Hula Sinagoro ‘father’ ama ama tama ‘milk’ laa laa lata ‘sew’ uli uli tuli ‘grandparent’ upu upu tubu ‘sago’ lapia lapia labia ‘pigeon’ pune pune pune ‘skin’ opi kopi kopi ‘bird’ manu manu manu ‘mosquito’ nemo nemo nemo There are a number of correspondences between identical phonemes. Aroma m corresponds to Hula m and Sinagoro m. This correspondence is 12 CHAPTER 1 abbreviated as m:m:m. We can also see all the vowels ( a:a:a, i:i:i, and so on). But there are also some correspondences between diferent phonemes: First, although we have the set p:p:p (as in pune : pune : pune ‘pigeon’), we also have another set p.p:b (as in lapia : lapia : labia ‘sago’). Then, we also have the set θ:θ: t (where θ represents the absence of a sound), as in uli: uli: tuli ‘sew.’ The important thing about both types of correspondence sets is that they are regular. They are not random, but occur again and again in many words. Even in the short list above, you can see a number of examples of each.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  Available until 3 Feb |Learn more

  Language, Culture, and Society

  An Introduction to Linguistic Anthropology

  • James Stanlaw, Nobuko Adachi, Zdenek Salzmann(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Persian might be added to the same family” (Salus 1969). As early as the sixteenth century, it had been suspected that many European languages were related and that their parent language might be Sanskrit, anancient language of India. Jones, however, went still further; according to him, Sanskrit, ancient Greek, Latin, and other European languages were the descendants of a language spoken in prehistoric times. During the first half of the nineteenth century, a number of major works were published to demonstrate in some detail that relationships existed not only among the several ancient languages that were no longer spoken but also between them and Germanic, Slavic, Romance, Baltic, and other languages spoken in Europe and southwestern Asia. During the same period, reconstructions were begun of words of the ancestral language, assumed to have been spoken before the invention of writing and therefore never documented. These reconstructions proceeded so rapidly that in 1868, the German philologist August Schleicher (1821–1868) was able to “translate” into the prehistoric ancestral language a short fable about a sheep and three horses.

  What can be reconstructed, and how are such reconstructions accomplished? It is possible to reconstruct the sounds and meanings of words as well as the grammar and syntax of an earlier undocumented state of a language, but usually the ultimate goal of linguistic reconstruction is the assumed ancestral language, or protolanguage, of all those languages derived from the same source. Reconstruction of a protolanguage requires thorough knowledge of historical grammar and good acquaintance with the daughter languages. The procedure is intricate, but the two main assumptions underlying it are not difficult to explain. The first assumption is that recurring similarities between words from different languages or dialects indicate that these languages or dialects are related to each other and must therefore have descended from a common ancestral language. The second assumption is that, as discussed above, sound changes are regular under like circumstances.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  Into the Mother Tongue

  • Clare Painter(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  A final point of course is that the systemic approach to language development is a sociolinguistic one 'in which the learning of the mother tongue is interpreted as a process of interaction between the child and other human beings.' (Halliday 1975a: 5-6). It is this focus which allows the protolanguage—Phase I of language development — t o be readily seen as a development of the earlier interactional behaviours which have been so minutely described over the past THE PROTOLANGUAGE 51 five or six years by psychologists exploring the notion of inter-subjectivity in relation to early communication. Obviously there may be non-linguistic theoretical grounds for altering or realigning the functions proposed by Halliday. However, my interest in the protolangauge is as part of a linguistic continuum, and for my purposes the microfunctional framework as articulated by Halliday will be a viable one on the following two conditions: 1. If the functions proposed prove a manageable and usable way of interpreting early utterances without doing violence either to the observed data or to our understanding of the child's social and mental world. 2. If at the same time it can provide an analytic tool which allows later language development to be seen as bearing some relation to earlier infant vocalizations. Some kind of functional framework can clearly fulfil the latter demand, if only because it relates easily to the notion of illocution-ary function or speech act in adult, which would be the only kind of (non-phonological) category within linguistic theory which is remotely applicable to the pre-mother-tongue period. With regard to the first point, I have argued that in general terms the micro-functional analysis seems compatible with the picture we have of the child's social and cognitive growth in the first year of life. The extent to which I have found it 'manageable' and applicable to my data will become clear in the following section presenting the proto-language data.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book