Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
Wiktionary
alt. (context linguistics English) A language which is reconstructed by examining similarities in existing languages to try to deduce what a common ancestor language, no longer known, would have been like. n. (context linguistics English) A language which is reconstructed by examining similarities in existing languages to try to deduce what a common ancestor language, no longer known, would have been like.
Wikipedia
A proto-language in the tree model of historical linguistics is a language – usually hypothetical or reconstructed, and unattested – from which a number of attested, or documented, known languages are believed to have descended by evolution, or slow modification of the proto-language into languages that form a language family.
In the strict sense, a proto-language is the latest common ancestor of a language family (immediately before the start of the divergence into the attested idioms) and thus corresponds to the most recent common ancestor in biology, although the term is often used more loosely. Moreover, a group of idioms (such as a dialect cluster) which are not considered separate languages (for whichever reasons) can also be described as descending from a unitary proto-language.
Occasionally, the German term Ursprache (from Ur- "primordial" and Sprache "language", ) is used instead.
A proto-language is a hypothetical or reconstructed language from which a number of known languages are believed to have descended in historical linguistics.
Proto-language may also refer to:
- Proto-language (glottogony), primitive language-like systems or forms of communication posited in theories of the origin of language
- Proto-Human language, a hypothetical ancestor of all the world's languages
- Musical protolanguage, a theory of the origins of music and vocal communication
Usage examples of "proto-language".
He believed it had arisen after the Sidhe returned to Earth, and that it was the proto-language out of which had arisen several of the major human language groups, the most familiar of them, for Savarin, belonging to the Indo-European branch.
Their bits of words, their proto-language, were surely a lot closer to the screeches of chimps, or even the songs of birds, than the vocalizations of humans.
Cavernous cathedrals of sombre brine would echo with the sonnets of ancient metacetacean proto-languages one day and be gone the next, replaced by mysterious labyrinths of liquid tubes and globular spaces, ringing with the chatter of dolphins.