Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun A language that is the recorded or hypothetical ancestor of another language or group of languages.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun Alternative spelling of
proto-language .
Etymologies
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Examples
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I came across it when I searched for "protolanguage" on Lulu.
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I came across it when I searched for "protolanguage" on Lulu.
Archive 2007-07-01 2007
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Feminist critic Elaine Showalter has gone so far as to claim hysteria as a root or first step of feminism--a kind of protolanguage of revolt communicating through the body messages that can't be verbalized, especially in a period of time when women or that matter men had no framework for signifying their often largely psycho-sexual repressions.
G. Roger Denson: "Old," "Crazy" and "Hysterical." Is That All There Is? G. Roger Denson 2011
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To capture the physiological reality of speaking a language, I proposed the idea of a “linguistic error limit”: the number of distinguishable sounds in a protolanguage, and therefore the number of objects that can be accurately described by this language, is limited.
SuperCooperators Martin A. Nowak 2011
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No, I'm not interested in how you think that Etruscan is related to Mayan or that you took offense to my position against clumsy protolanguage reconstructions.
Archive 2010-03-01 2010
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Reconstructing a protolanguage root that's unanalysable despite an etymology already available with a clear historical source is the kind of sloppy, unacademic nonsense I loathe with a passion.
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No, I'm not interested in how you think that Etruscan is related to Mayan or that you took offense to my position against clumsy protolanguage reconstructions.
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Reconstructing a protolanguage root that's unanalysable despite an etymology already available with a clear historical source is the kind of sloppy, unacademic nonsense I loathe with a passion.
Archive 2010-03-01 2010
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What I mean by "abuse" is when people, unsatisfied with a protolanguage proven to contain seemingly exotic laryngeals with accompanying vocalic effects, decide to add laryngeals to every stem to account for all long vowels, whether it can be justified or not, and end up succeeding only in muddling the whole grammatical system in the process, obscuring the very thing they attempt to clarify.
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What I mean by "abuse" is when people, unsatisfied with a protolanguage proven to contain seemingly exotic laryngeals with accompanying vocalic effects, decide to add laryngeals to every stem to account for all long vowels, whether it can be justified or not, and end up succeeding only in muddling the whole grammatical system in the process, obscuring the very thing they attempt to clarify.
Archive 2009-07-01 2009
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