Proto-Languages - How Are they Reconstructed?

No, "Language Divorce" is Not my Amateur Term for Divergent Evolution! · Proto-Languages - How Are they Reconstructed? · Sabellian and some more, but first Vulgar Latin · Indo-European and Romance are Very Different as to Diachronic Linguistics · More on Language : Latin to Romance · More on Latin to Romance and Middle English to English · More on language in general

Q

How do linguists reconstruct proto-languages?
https://www.quora.com/How-do-linguists-reconstruct-proto-languages/answer/Hans-Georg-Lundahl-2

Hans-Georg Lundahl

amateur linguist

15.VII.2023

Note first, the reconstruction and the proof there was one are different things.

Germanic has had its proto-language reconstructed several times since Grimm, but this does not mean that the Germanic group is only doubtfully a family. On the other hand, some may think Nostratic is proven, but no one can reconstruct Nostratic. And on another slant, sometimes Sprachbund phenomena can be so long ago or have been filtered by “sound laws” so they give results reconstructible as from a proto-language.

Now, you asked for the process.

Step one, filter out spelling conventions (optional, but useful, if you do it, you use IPA as substitute for the language’s own spelling).

Step two, find words from each of two or more languages that seem similar and seem to mean the same thing. Now check how they differ.

Portuguese ouro, Spanish / Italian oro, Romanian aur, French or.

Portuguese and Romanian have diphthong ou / au
Spanish, Italian, French have simple vowel o.

Portuguese, Spanish, Italian end in -ro.
French and Romanian in -r.

Step three, reconstruct a proto-form.

From these one would not reconstruct the actually verified Latin proto-form aurum, but one would reconstruct something similar, *auro.

Step four, express the findings in sound laws leading from the reconstructed Protoform to a language’s form.

*auro > aur Romanian loses final -o
*auro > ouro Portuguese changes au to ou
*auro > (ouro > ) oro Spanish and Italian change au (or ou from au) to o
*auro > oro > or French changes au to o and drops final o
OR
*auro > aur > or French drops final o and changes au to o.

Step five, if a reconstruction doesn’t lend itself to explain a certain language’s form, one may have to change the reconstruction. For instance, if from French and Romanian, I had reconstructed a proto-form *aur, it would not have explained the final -o in Italian, Spanish and Portuguese.

Step six, get as many examples as you can for each sound law. (The ones here given are in fact very well supported by other words that these languages have from Latin or from Greek words used in colloquial Latin).

Step seven, see if a standard form of a language has borrowed from other dialects. For instance, Latin lupum would normally give French leu, and actually does in precisely one expression, but the normal French word for wolf is loup, arguably from Provençal “lop” but respelling “o” as “ou” where Provençal pronounces it like “oo” and not like “aw” …

Step eight, see if the sound laws also fit the conjugations and declinsions.

Step nine, reconstruct the conjugations and declinsion as best as you can.

The original ones, that is.

Step 10, explain what analogies have reshaped what would be the normal result of the sound laws on original declinsions and conjugations.