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From: alderson@netcom.com (Richard M. Alderson III)
Subject: Re: original Indo-European words
In-Reply-To: John Ayala's message of Sat, 18 Mar 95 09:59:21 -0500
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	<D5JqtC.36E@festival.ed.ac.uk> <ZK-62dZ.padrote@delphi.com>
Date: Wed, 29 Mar 1995 01:54:52 GMT
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In article <ZK-62dZ.padrote@delphi.com> John Ayala <padrote@delphi.com> writes:

>K Thier <kthier@festival.ed.ac.uk> writes:

>>Unfortunately, this does not lead to definite conclusions about where the
>>indo-European languages come from.  By many scholars, Proto IE is now
>>considered a scholarly system to describe relationships rather than an actual
>>spoken language.

>I don't understand this argument, and I hope someone will be kind enough to
>explain it.

I suspect that what was meant is that nowadays, we do not think that we are
reconstructing the phonetics of the language to such an extent that we can
speak it in any serious sense.  This is in contrast to our predecessors of a
generation or two back, and certainly to the Junggrammatiker of the late 19th
century, for whom the reconstruction was a real language.

> I grant that the system called Proto-IE is just that - a system which
>explains certain relationships. But why do those relationships exist at all?
>Couldn't someone take French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, etc. and construct
>a system called "Proto-Romance", using the same principles which underly the
>construction of Proto-IE?

Someone's name was Robert Hall, and he did this in the late 1950s and early
1960s; I believe that he published a book of his reconstructions in the 1970s.

>Now this system would not be identical to late Latin, but it should have many
>things in common with it. In other words it would be possible to use "Proto-
>Romance" to discover certain things about Latin. My question is, would it be
>possible to construct Proto-IE at all without the existence of a language X,
>which was a real spoken language?

Hall's Proto-Romance *has* shown some things about Vulgar Latin that accord
with what we find in other Indo-European languages.  For example, the diphthong
in C(lassical) L(atin) _cauda_ "tail" is unexpected--and the descendants in the
Romance languages show that this was a hypercorrection among the speakers of
CL.

Certainly, in my opinion, which I believe that I share with the majority of
historical linguists, the possibility of reconstruction correlates with the
existence of the thing reconstructed.  So I would answer your last question
"No."
-- 
Rich Alderson		[Tolkien quote temporarily removed in favour of
alderson@netcom.com	 proselytizing comment below --rma]

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