Timeline for How does an original proto language produce its daughter languages?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
11 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sep 2, 2021 at 14:08 | comment | added | chepner | Both. Proto-Germanic itself can be considered the ancestor of Proto-Norse, which is the ancestor of Icelandic, Swedish, Norwegian, etc, but not of English, modern German, or Dutch. (Though yes, I am aware of various degrees of opinion on how much influence Proto-Norse and its offshoots may have had on the development of English.) | |
| Sep 2, 2021 at 0:00 | history | tweeted | twitter.com/StackLinguist/status/1433218171301990405 | ||
| Sep 1, 2021 at 15:59 | comment | added | Alex B. | All of these questions are fine, you just need to read the textbook I've already recommended several times, Lyle Campbell, Historical Linguistics: An introduction (2020, 4th ed.), published by Edinburgh UP (in the UK) and MIT (in the US). Chapter 9. Language classification and models of language change. | |
| Sep 1, 2021 at 14:49 | comment | added | Barmar | Language evolution is indeed not unlike genetic evolution. The difficulty that linguists encounter is that written language is relatively recent, so we don't have "fossils" of early languages. The best they can do is hypothesize what the "proto" languages were like. | |
| Sep 1, 2021 at 5:49 | answer | added | curiousdannii♦ | timeline score: 16 | |
| Sep 1, 2021 at 5:38 | history | edited | curiousdannii♦ | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
edited tags
|
| Sep 1, 2021 at 4:24 | history | became hot network question | |||
| Aug 31, 2021 at 20:44 | answer | added | user6726 | timeline score: 14 | |
| Aug 31, 2021 at 20:41 | comment | added | Linguist Enthusiast | This is how I imagine it too. If you begin with source A say its splits its A1, A2 and A3, then A1 into A1A1, A2 into A2A1 and A3 into A3A1, and then A1A1 into A1A1A1, A1A1A2 etc like the haplogroups in genetics. Is the same happening with languages then? Here I am confused. | |
| Aug 31, 2021 at 20:33 | comment | added | Yellow Sky | It's best to look at that process from the point of view of communities of people: if a community splits, each of the resulting new communities tends to develop its own dialect, and the further those communities get separated, the more divergent their dialects become. There can be zillions of variants of how it can happen, and since most languages got separated from one another centuries and millennia ago, little can be known of the minute details of their factions, dialectal affiliation, and interactions among those closely related communities. It could be any way. | |
| Aug 31, 2021 at 20:20 | history | asked | Linguist Enthusiast | CC BY-SA 4.0 |