Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2015 February 16

= February 16 =

proto-language
How many is the proto-languages?--95.251.179.126 (talk) 19:04, 16 February 2015 (UTC)


 * Just the one, I'm afraid. Sir William Matthew Flinders Petrie &#124; Say Shalom! 27 Shevat 5775 19:09, 16 February 2015 (UTC)
 * If the OP meant how many branches there are from the original proto-language (that is, how many language groups like Proto-Indo-European language or Proto-Semitic language there are), that part of the tree hasn't been figured out yet. Ian.thomson (talk) 19:33, 16 February 2015 (UTC)


 * I would interpret the question as meaning "How many times (do we know about) that language has independently developed?" This is a perfectly reasonable question, and the answer is, we don't know. Proponents Proto-World believe that the answer is once, and that we can go some way to reconstructing the one. Most linguists, I think do not accept that. My opinion is that all known languages probably do go back to a single proto-language, but that we will never be able to demonstrate this. But nobody knows, and I suspect that nobody ever will. --ColinFine (talk) 23:28, 16 February 2015 (UTC)


 * List of proto-languages --&mdash;  Rhododendrites talk  \\ 03:19, 17 February 2015 (UTC)


 * Caveat lector: what is ranked as a proto-language is almost always a matter of current reconstructed knowledge, not of any necessarily important node in actual history. See, for example, Ritwan and Algonquin versus Algonquian-Ritwan and Anatolian languages and PIE versus Indo-Hittite. μηδείς (talk) 02:14, 19 February 2015 (UTC)


 * The number of proto-languages is actually quite large, if you consider all the intermediate proto-languages such as Proto-Germanic. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 18:21, 21 February 2015 (UTC)