Re: Can realism be retro-fitted?

On Jan 19, 2007, at 6:19 AM, Benct Philip Jonsson wrote:
> This makes a reconstructed protolanguage a rather special
> thing, and different from the actual prehistoric language(s)
> that once existed in that you can only reconstruct the
> regularities and those parts of structure which survive --
> or leave a mark, the technical term is "leave a reflex" or
> "be reflected" -- in the descendant languages. Any
> irregularities and anything which analogy, phonetic loss
> ('merger with zero'), syntactic and morphotactic change
> [...] has done away
> with cannot be reconstructed, so a protolanguage (
> '*asterisk language' ) is only a subset of the actual
> prehistoric language.
This is a very interesting point.  I don't think I've ever heard it
explicitly formulated in this way.  Thanks!

Adam

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