A proto-language is the common ancestor of the languages that form a language family. Occasionally, the German term Ursprache (from Ur- "primordial" and Sprache "language") is used instead.

Often the proto-language is not known directly. In such cases, it may be reconstructed by comparing different members of the language family through the comparative method. The level of completeness of the reconstruction achieved varies, depending on how complete the evidence is from the descendant languages and on the quality of the effort of the linguists working on it. Some of the many unattested proto-languages for which reconstructions have been devised are Proto-Indo-European, Proto-Uralic, and Proto-Dravidian.

In other cases, the proto-language is attested in surviving texts. For example, Latin is the proto-language of the Romance language family, which includes such modern languages as French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and Romanian. Likewise, Proto-Norse, the ancestor of the modern Scandinavian languages, is attested, albeit in fragmentary form, in ancient runic inscriptions. Although there are no very early Indo-Aryan inscriptions, the Indo-Aryan languages of modern India all go back to Vedic Sanskrit (or dialects very closely related to it), which has been preserved in texts accurately handed down by parallel oral and written traditions for many centuries.

The first person to offer systematic reconstructions of an unattested proto-language was August Schleicher; he did so for Proto-Indo-European in 1861 (Lehmann 1993:26).

[edit] References

• Lehmann, Winfred P. 1993. Theoretical Bases of Indo-European Linguistics. London: Routledge.
• Schleicher, August 1861–1862. Compendium der vergleichenden Grammatik der indogermanischen Sprachen, 2 volumes. Weimar: H. Boehlau. (Reprint: Minerva GmbH, Wissenschaftlicher Verlag. ISBN 3-8102-1071-4.)

[edit] See also

• Comparative method
• Historical linguistics
• Proto-Human language