protolanguage

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According to other assumptions, the words of Alexander of Macedonia are written in baktriyan language protolanguage of today's Bulgarians.

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Definitions (1)

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  1. noun A language that is the recorded or hypothetical ancestor of another language or group of languages. Also called Ursprache.

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Examples (4)

  • Omni: Are you suggesting a protolanguage, or prelanguage period? —  Omni: June 1993
  • According to other assumptions, the words of Alexander of Macedonia are written in baktriyan language protolanguage of today's Bulgarians. —  dailyindia.com News Feed
  • Is there any difference between a word which is reconstructable for a protolanguage and a word which spread from dialect to dialect of the protolanguage as it was breaking up? —  languagehat.com
  • "protolanguage" which we reconstruct is most unlikely to correspond to a single, completely uniform dialect that existed in the real world before its speaking population became large enough to exhibit significant linguistic diversity; it almost inevitably corresponds to a dialectally diversified speech community, still unified but no longer uniform, simply because we can't tell the difference between words and grammatical forms which had been in the language for generations and those which had arrived very recently. —  languagehat.com
 

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