Is there any evidence of (pre)proto-IE? (Philological Room) Language Learning Forum

Is there any evidence of (pre)proto-IE?
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18 messages over 3 pages: 1 2 3

Марк
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Message 17 of 18

06 July 2012 at 9:49pm | IP Logged

vonPeterhof wrote:

Chung wrote:

As another example, imagine if linguists somehow
had no attestations of Gothic and Old Norse. Indeed would they even fathom the presence
of such languages? What kind of reconstruction would we then see for Proto-Germanic?
Would it be heavily influenced by what we observe in Icelandic as it's considered to be
a conservative language?

The book "The Horse, the Wheel and Language" by David
Anthony (its first part is a very good introduction to IE studies and historical
linguistics for non-linguists, written by an archaeologist in an attempt to reconcile
archaeologists and linguists) actually gives a few examples of this. I read it a long
time ago, so I don't remember everything, but I do recall him giving an example of a
hypothesized feature of Proto-Germanic that was later confirmed by the discovery of an
inscription in a very archaic form of either Old High German or Old Saxon. There was
also an experiment in historical linguistics where someone tried to reconstruct "proto-
Romance" while pretending that no attestations of Latin existed. The result that they
got was actually quite close to actual Latin, but some of the features of actual Latin
were not "discovered", most notably the differentiation of vowel length.

they could restore only late latin, at the moment when the languages started separating
from each other. The vowel length had already been lost at that time.
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vonPeterhof
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Message 18 of 18

07 July 2012 at 12:57pm | IP Logged

I looked up the relevant passage on Google Books (pages 31-32): the Romance researcher's name was Robert A. Hall, and yes, it is mentioned that what was reconstructed was closer to Vulgar Latin than to Classical Latin. However, apparently he did manage to detect that there was a distinction between two groups of vowels, he just couldn't figure out that it was vowel length. This is a common problem in linguistic reconstructions - detecting a distinction with no means of identifying it exactly. Also, apparently the Germanic inscription referred to was on one of the Golden Horns of Gallehus, and it confirmed the Proto-Germanic word *gastiz (ancestor of "guest"), specifically that there was an i before the final vowel - something that no Germanic languages attested earlier preserved. Oh, and the language was identified as Proto-Norse, so my apologies for the misinformation earlier.
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