Think about it like this. Let’s say you’re a far future linguist, and in your future, Modern English and Modern Scots have diverged into completely mutually unintelligible languages. But, you are able to reconstruct “Proto-British”. You’re going to come up with reconstructions that reflect English/Scots speech across a thousand years. There are words that are the same right now, in the twentieth century. There are others that underwent semantic shifts back when Northumbrian was a thing.
What you’ve got definitely represents the historical ancestor of your future British languages, but you haven’t actually got a language. You’ve got snapshots of a dialect continuum across hundreds of years. And, to the point of the thread, there is no place you could take a time machine and microphone and record anyone speaking anything like what you’ve reconstructed.
No. More that you might (very hypothetically) reconstruct “automobile” and “ken” as elements of your Proto language, despite those words never existing simultaneously in the English-Scots continuum.
Let’s say you’re a far future linguist, and in your future, Modern English and Modern Scots have diverged into completely mutually unintelligible languages.(Scottishiis kllakeuuıBut, you are able to reconstruct “Proto-British”.
And yet /u/OllieFromCairo is doing the equivalent of this far future linguist denying that English existed.
I totally agree with the point you were making about how an unattested proto-language is a fluid thing which evolves like any recorded language, but your first comment in that thread is straight-up wrong. PIE was a real, spoken language for some time, even if our present-day reconstruction of it is based solely on comparative theory and largely fails to take into account linguistic evolution.
6 comments
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1 tifrifrudr 2019-04-12
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https://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/bbfkt6/if_you_had_a_time_machine_which_languages_would/ekjbbhv/
1 IVIaskerade 2019-04-12
And yet /u/OllieFromCairo is doing the equivalent of this far future linguist denying that English existed.
1 OllieFromCairo 2019-04-12
Oh please. Try actually reading.
1 MalcolmFFucker 2019-04-12
I totally agree with the point you were making about how an unattested proto-language is a fluid thing which evolves like any recorded language, but your first comment in that thread is straight-up wrong. PIE was a real, spoken language for some time, even if our present-day reconstruction of it is based solely on comparative theory and largely fails to take into account linguistic evolution.