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Re: Can realism be retro-fitted?

From:Adam Parrish <ap1607@...>
Date:Friday, January 19, 2007, 15:22
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

Replies

Benct Philip Jonsson <conlang@...>
Terrence Donnelly <terrence.donnelly@...>New language Thisbo