Linguistic reconstruction
Linguistic reconstruction is the practice of establishing the features of an unattested ancestor language of one or more given languages.
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[edit]- It is disappointing to have to say that at present there seems to be no hope of estimating objectively and with a useful degree of precision how long an originally homogeneous Indo-European language would have taken to develop into derivative groups or languages which diverged as much as Greek, Sanskrit and Hittite did when the earliest texts in them were composed. Some linguists seem to think that they can make intuitive judgements about the minimum time which a particular phonetic or other change in a language would have taken. But the results of intuition when applied to estimating the minimum time in which a group of cognate languages or dialects would have differentiated to an observed extent vary so much that no useful deductions can be made from them.
I sympathize with archaeologists and other prehistorians who are not primarily linguists over this. Linguists are unable to provide the information which would be most useful.- Crossland, Ronald. 1972. "Recent Reappraisal of Evidence for the Chronology of the Differentiation of Indo-European." In Acta of the 2nd International Colloquium on Aegean Prehistory (46-55). Athens: Ministry of Culture and Science. Crossland (1972) quoted in Bryant, E. F. (2001). The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture : the Indo-Aryan migration debate. Oxford University Press. chapter 12
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[edit]- We must not make the mistake of confusing our methods, and the results flowing from them, with the facts; we must not delude ourselves into believing that our retrogressive method of reconstruction matches, step by step, the real progression of linguistic history.
- E. Pulgram, "Proto-Indo-European Reality and Reconstruction", Language, 35 (1959), pp. 421-6. Quoted in E. F. Bryant, The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture (Oxford UP, 2001), ch. 4
- No reputable linguist pretends that Proto-Indo-European reconstructions represent a reality, and the unpronounceability of the asterisked formulae is not a legitimate argument against reconstruction.
- Ernst Pulgram, quoted by Jean-Paul Demoule, The Indo-Europeans: Archaeology, Language, Race, and the Search for the Origins of the West (2023)
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[edit]- Hermann goes even further: complete forms cannot be reconstructed at all, only single sounds, and even these are meant as approximations only, not as phonetically completely correct reconstructions.
- Szemerényi O. 1996 Introduction to Indo-European Linguistics (translated from German 1990, with additional notes and references) Oxford, OUP. [1] page 33.
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[edit]- Comparative grammar is in reality radically incapable of discriminating between divergent kinship… and convergent kinship.
- Tremblay X. 2005 ‘Grammaire comparé et grammaire historique’ in Fussman G., Kellens J., et al. p. 63
