I’ve been fascinated recently by historical linguistics, and in particular reconstructed proto-languages such as Proto-Indo-European.

But what even is a “proto-language”?

Well, if we go for the literal operationalization, Wikipedia defines a proto-language as:

a postulated ancestral language from which a number of attested languages are believed to have descended by evolution, forming a language family.

[…]

It is by definition a linguistic reconstruction formulated by applying the comparative method to a group of languages featuring similar characteristics.

So a proto-language is supposed to be the closest common ancestor of a language family (or subfamily), and it is reconstructed using the comparative method (which as the name suggests, works by comparing the different daughter languages to reconstruct (mostly) sound structure (phonology) and word structure (morphology).

But they’re a weird kind of thing.

First, proto-languages are not attested. This means that we have no example of writing in any proto-language. [...]

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